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Spanish paper firm SAICA has announced it will build one
of Europe's largest paper recycling mills at a site near Manchester.
Construction work on the £290m development will start later
this year and the plant is expected to begin operating from
February 2012.
The company said that, when fully operational, the plant
will produce approximately 400,000 tonnes of recycled paper
a year, which will be used to manufacture recycled corrugated
boxes. It added that its new state-of-the-art recycling technology
would produce enough metre-wide sheets of cardboard to cover
the distance from Manchester to London every three hours.
Eduardo Aragües, President of the SAICA
Group, hailed the project as a "huge investment"
that underlined the company's commitment to bolstering its
presence in the UK.
The mill will have a sizable impact on the UK paper industry's
environmental footprint, according to SAICA.
It calculated that the increase in recycling capacity will
reduce the 450,000 tonnes a year of used paper that is exported
from the UK for recycling, while also cutting the amount of
container board imported from the EU.
The facility's direct environmental impact will also be reduced
through the installation of a Combined Heat and Power (CHP)
system and onsite effluent treatment plant designed to enhance
energy efficiency and limit waste from the plant.
The project is also likely to be welcomed by the UK's recycling
industry, which has been campaigning for more recycling capacity
to be developed ever since the onset of global recession undermined
the business case for shipping recyclable material to be processed
in China.
The market has recovered significantly in the past year -
but, back in 2008, a collapse in the price of recyclable materials
such as paper, glass and metal led to stockpiling by waste
management firms as they waited for demand from China to return.
The export market subsequently returned, but industry insiders
have warned that greater UK recycling capacity is required
to help protect against a potential repeat.
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