Originally, the facility was to be in Thurrock, but the company, which has enlisted Nordic Recycling to operate the MRF, found the new location had a more appropriately designed building with more space.
It is now going through the planning process with this new site.
Paper will be separated from other domestic streams at the 75,000 tonnes capacity MRF ready for transportation to Holmen's paper mills in Sweden and Spain. The company says it can not always rely on other MRFs to produce clean enough quality paper for its mills.
The company is in talks with a number of local authorities, which are currently running a mixture of separate and commingled collections. Braintree council has just signed a five year contract to send its mixed collections to the MRF.
Holmen Paper's UK recycling director Charlie Thompson is expecting to take about 8,000 tonnes a year from Braintree at the MRF, which he hopes will be running at its capacity of 150,000 tonnes by 2008 and eventually reaching 250,000 tonnes.
The company is also looking to build more MRFs around the UK. “Ultimately we are planning to build more. We are cutting our teeth on this one and having Nordic Recycling run it on a design, build and operate basis as they have plenty of experience in MRFs.”
Collections will also include plastic bottles and cans, but Holmen says its research has indicated that it should be able to guarantee extracting 50% in clean news and pams from the material.
Quality
Mr Thompson said he is certain that newspapers from the MRF will be of high enough quality to be recycled into a good grade of paper.
He explained: “That was the idea. We wanted to carefully control what is coming out of the MRF ourselves. We do take paper from other MRFs and some paper isn't clean enough. This way we have carefully researched the equipment to ensure the right quality.”
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