Exclusive:
If you think you’ve got your work cut out this Christmas, spare a thought for the staff of the UK’s largest paper recycling factory.
Piles of giftwrap and cards in the average living room are a drop in the ocean compared to the daily lot of this hardworking team. Kemsley Paper Mill receives 144 lorries of waste a day to be recycled.
It is Europe’s second largest and processes 830,000 tons a year. Christmas is the busiest time and Black Friday has brought the festive rush much earlier.
Operations director Guy Lacey says: “We get very, very busy in that period with packaging coming from people’s homes. Sometimes the recycling network really struggles with the volume.”
One problem is that not all packaging is recyclable and gets mixed in with the all the stuff that is.
Guy explains: “With the packaging that has glitter on it, we can’t really make good use of it. Anything that contains plastics or anything that is added to the product can cause us problems with the recycling or in the later process.”
The Kent factory is run by DS Smith which recommends a ‘scrunch test’ before people stick wrapping paper in their recycling bins. If it stays scrunched up when you crumple it in your hand it is good to go. If not it has a plastic film so cannot be recycled.
Research by the London-based packaging giant estimates that the nation is set to waste 300,000 tons of packaging this festive season.
Over a quarter of this could end up not being recycled. Contamination is a big reason it ends in landfill instead. In a perfect world, Guy believes everyone should have a separate bin for paper and cardboard.
He adds: “Having one bin for all recycling does make things harder. If people put in something like a baked bean can with residue in or a milk carton that still has a bit inside, then this can contaminate the paper so much it can’t be accepted for recycling and sent to us.
“When paper and plastic get wet they can also stick together so it is very difficult for the sorting stations to sort it out.
“In an ideal world everyone would have a single bin for paper and cardboard they could keep dry but I appreciate there are challenges, such as with big tower blocks having too many bins.
“Making sure you avoid contamination, by cleaning out food packets for example, and keeping it as separate as possible massively helps us.”
During our visit to Kemsley, near Sittingbourne, we were shown how waste is turned back into paper – something that takes just 20 minutes. Material comes in on lorries from sorting hubs, where it has been separated from plastics, cans and glass.
Kemsley’s job is to get as many of the paper-making fibres out of that recovered paper as they possibly can.
Guy says: “That does still have some contamination in it. We bring warm water and put it into a big blender, stir it up and it releases all the paper-making fibres. We then have a slurry of fibre which we make paper from and we clean it as best we can using various different technologies to remove the different materials.
“Once we have the fibre at a clean level, we make another sheet of paper in one of our paper machines by removing the water, and dry it.”
This is then reeled up into giant three-ton rolls of paper, most of which are sent to DS Smith box plants where they are converted into board and boxes for packaging, with the remaining produce used for specialist papers. It is all 100% recyclable.
The UK’s paper and cardboard recycling rate is lagging – we are 25th out of 30 European nations, with recycling rates of just 73% compared to the average of 82%. But Guy says he does believe people are making more effort.
He adds: “I think there will be more of a generational shift. When I was at school we didn’t have recycling at home but younger people have grown up with it and understand the role they play in it.”
Kemsley started out producing newsprint and is celebrating its 100th year of operation. Guy says: “If we didn’t exist, that incoming material would have nowhere to go and would just be burned and put into a hole in the ground.
“This is really valuable stuff that can be reused time and time again into paper and boxes.”
