At the same time, the company has emphasised that the Ellesmere Port plant has a strong future and that plans exist for future investment.
General manager Brian Stevenson told letsrecycle.com today that the company is consulting on 60 possible job losses. “We are starting talks with the workforce and their representative union the GPMU.”
Mr Stevenson said that he expected that there would be some voluntary redundancies but compulsory redundancies had not been ruled out.
More efficient
The losses will form part of a restructuring of the plant with the aim of “making a more efficient plant, better able to compete for the long run.”
Bridgewater saw some investment in the 1990s and has three paper making machines and three deinking plants with a production capacity of 289,000 tonnes of standard and coloured newsprint a year. It sources and procures used newspapers and magazines for the plant through its wholly owned subsidiary Cheshire Recycling. Current investment is seeing about 1 million spent this year on upgrading one of the paper machines and Mr Stevenson said that further future investment was likely to be considered.
Bridgewater is owned by the paper multinational Abitibi-Consolidated of Canada, which is the world's largest maker of newsprint. The company has carried out rationalisation operations at a number of its other mills over the past year.
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