Mills must recognise recovery costs, says paper expert

Mr West, who is retiring from his position as sales director of Severnside Recycling this month, spoke of the need for better understanding of recovery costs at a recent meeting of the Bureau of International Recycling.

Speaking ahead of his retirement at the end of the month, Mr West told letsrecycle.com that the industry was in a healthier state than it has ever been because of legislation requiring more paper to be collected. “But, there remains an urgent need for mills and the recovery sector to come together and agree an audited and transparent cost for collection and sorting, which can be borne in mind for contracts.”

Landfill

The need for recognition of sorting costs is particularly acute in the UK, he explained, where landfill charges are still much lower than on the Continent. “For a taxing Chancellor, the decision to raise the Landfill Tax by 3 a year for several years means that it is going to take years for the landfill price to reach a fair level.”

Because of this, said Mr West, it remains hard for the paper recovery sector to put in high enough charges to cover costs and attract additional material for recycling. “We want to recover ever higher volumes of material but we can only do this if it is proving economically viable to collect. The mills assume we can charge the polluter but in the UK it costs 70-80 a tonne for collection and for the polluter it is still cheaper to send materials to landfill. You can't force businesses to pay higher costs.”

Mr West has been a long time chairman of key international paper committees and organisations, including the recovered paper committee of the Bureau of International Recycling.

Grade lists

One of his main achievements was driving through a set of grade lists agreed throughout Europe. Until the late 1990s there were a number of different grade lists used by various Western European countries as well as the American Paper Stock Industries list.

Mr West recalled: “The EN643 grade list came about at BIR as we concluded that it was crazy that there were national lists in Europe. I took the lead and wrote to the US paper stock industries. There was some concern about this and that the European lists might be subsumed into the American Paper Stock list.

“In the end we managed to agree a new European list which is now widely used and covers some six million tonnes of paper exported every year from Northern Europe.”

The importance of the list, explained Mr West, is that it enabled the European Union as well as the Basel Convention to have an effective grading system for legislation. The list also has knock on consequences for the UK with the link to the EN643 agreement over the need to avoid comingled collection of paper from households.

Mr West urged that EN643 should be developed and that exports of paper should only be allowed under the rules within the guidance framework and that “anything that doesn’t fit into the rules should only be shipped under international controls.”

Severnside

For Severnside, which is part of the St Regis group, Jim Malone will take on the export and other work carried out by Mr West. “I believe I am leaving Severnside in excellent shape,” said Mr West. “The company is continuing to grow and has seen expansion in Hull and Stoke and we are developing our facility management services.”