The work is central to the current debate about the EN643 British Standard, which while not a legal requirement, discourages the recovery of paper in a comingled fashion from the waste stream.
Collection authorities have raised concerns that the standard will force them to abandon current comingled systems or to adopt expensive collection systems that they will not be able to sustain. There is a view among many collectors – local authorities and the waste industry – that the paper mills are simply seeking to pass down the line the costs of cleaning and processing the recovered paper.
Last week Andy Doran, chair of the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee, asked how realistic it would be to meet the EN643 requirements, stating: “We don’t see many poor paper merchants.”
Importing
Responding to Mr Doran, Ron Humphries, managing director of Cheshire Recycling and chairman of the British Recovered Paper Association said that the standard was coming from “the European centre. In the UK we are a net importer of paper, importing more than 50%. It is not likely that we will have enough manufacturing capacity to use all that is collected or we will drown in recovered paper.”
He continued: “The problem is the same in Europe as in the UK. Europe has to have that ability to move that product across borders. Waste paper has to have a standard, the paper currently collected meets all EN 643 standards.”
Mr Humphries said there are a lot of people “not in the paper industry” who promote the comingled approach. “They don’t look at the full equation. EN643 is not a law, it is a standard and three of the major retailers have it in their contracts. It has to be there so we can have a homogenous cross country standard.”
The EN643 standard is important for WRAP as it strives to meet its targets to increase the recycling of waste paper. A worse case scenario could mean hundreds of thousands of tonnes of comingled waste paper in the UK and as much as five million tonnes across Europe, not sent for recycling.
The paper industry itself is still keen to say that the standard is not something that is being imposed immediately. And there is some lack of clarity from the industry over how it should be interpreted.
Refuse sorting
David Gillett, the Paper Federation's environment manager said that the wording used is “European terminology”. This is important because of the use of the term “refuse sorting station” within the standard. Mr Gillett told letsrecycle.com that the materials recycling facilities (MRFs) count as refuse sorting stations. However, no distinction appears to have been made between dirty MRFs (sorting household refuse), which can be found on the Continent rather than the UK, and clean MRFs, typically found in the UK, which sort dry recyclables.
Mr Gillett could not identify which MRFs in the UK are generating the unacceptable paper but added that there are problems too with paper getting wet, even in blue bags.
Continued on page 2
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