With growing demand for local authority contracts, Newport Paper says it was the company’s guarantee of a maximum and minimum price for the local authority over the five years that secured the deal.
 Julia Black, Recycling Officer at Lewes District Council, and Matthew Hoare of Newport Paper |
Newport Paper will deliver the newspapers and magazines collected from Lewes households to the multinational paper firm Stora Enso for use at its new Langerbrugge mill in Belgium. Newport Paper is the designated UK purchasing partner for the Langerbrugge mill with Stora Enso opting to deal with one supplier.
Competition for used newspapers and magazines in the UK is expected to remain strong. Shotton’s new recycling capacity comes on stream in November while both Cheshire Recycling and Aylesford continue to secure tonnages. And, Stora Enso is also keen to tie up contracts through Newport Paper as more investment is planned at Langerbrugge to increase consumption there to a massive 700,000 tonnes per annum by 2007.
Trevor Watson, assistant head of waste and recycling services for Lewes district council, said: “As recycling is one of the major services we’re providing residents, we need constantly to review the return we get on the materials we collect, to make sure we’re getting the best deal to help finance the scheme. We now have over 25,000 households on the ‘Box-It!’ kerbside collection scheme and we’ve already collected 1,500 tonnes of paper from across the district this year.”
Guarantee
Matthew Hoare from Newport Paper, who was responsible for putting together the contract, said: “We find that many of our customers need to set budgets and forecasts for the collection of recyclables. The added pressure for local councils is coming from recycling targets set by central government. Our ability to set and guarantee an attractive upper and lower price is proving crucial to winning these local council contracts.”
Julia Black, recycling officer at Lewes, said that there had been competition for the contract and that the newspaper collection was an important of the authority’s expanding recycling service.
“Part of our ethos is to be as sustainable as we can. We use seven electric vehicles to carry out kerbside collections. We collect plastics and other items such as ink cartridges,” she said.
The district has recently invested in an additional two balers at its own sorting plant where it hand sorts and bales plastic bottles. On the collection side, some properties are served by the council’s own workforce while properties on the coastal side of the district and in some rural areas have a service provided by Furniture Now, a community group.
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