SMART DESIGNS, SMART RECYCLING
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The Totton site; manual sorting (opposite)
Unsold national newspapers are sent to SCA Recycling’s Totton MRF. Stuart Spear gets the scoop on operations at the Southampton plant
rading in recyclates is a dynamic business. Prices can be volatile, while international markets can evaporate to re-emerge else- where overnight. SCA Recycling is unique in that it recycles all the UK’s unsold national newspapers as well as dealing with domestic local authority waste. It means dedicated staff need to closely monitor international recyclate prices to ensure that profits are maximised.
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With its material recovery facility (MRF) based in Totton, Southampton, the company can swiftly respond to market changes. One day it could be loading a 12-metre sea con- tainer with paper bound for Indonesia; the next day it could be a truck destined for Germany, France or the Netherlands. Between 30-40% of its recycled paper goes to UK paper mills. SCA is unusual in that it is what is known in the trade as an integrated paper producer. Its Swedish-based parent company is a global manufacturer of paper nappies, tissues, feminine hygiene products, incontinence care and toilet paper. Its brand lines include Bodyform, Cushelle, Plenty, Temp and Velvet. It means the company has a voracious appetite for recycled paper, a need that is met by plants all across Europe. But to survive in the market it needs to col- lect far more paper than it actually consumes. Business development director Simon Barnes explains: “We collect five times as much paper as we need for our own use; this is surplus to the parent company’s needs. The nature of the paper market is that you need a critical mass
26 Local Authority Waste & Recycling March 2012
to play in that market to afford to run facilities like our MRF in Southampton. We need economies of scale to get over the one million tonnes mark and so deliver a lower cost product to our parent company.”
It is this need for economies of scale that has recently brought SCA into the local authority household waste mar- ket. Traditionally, the company relied on the pre-consumer paper market, unsold national newspapers that get returned by retailers. The problem is that our reading habits are changing and retailers are getting much smarter about how much they buy. Newspaper sales are down, more of us are reading digitally while smarter bar code analysis means that our buying habits can be better predicted, so cutting waste.
Post-consumer material
“We made the decision in 2008 that in order to secure fibre or paper going forward we needed to access post-consumer material coming out of houses and shops. We call it the urban forest,” explains Barnes.
Opened in October 2009, the £15M MRF plant at Hounsdown Business Park in Totton is designed to handle 200,000 tonnes a year of traditional newspaper overprint along with dry mixed recyclables. It is currently running at 80% capacity. While 70% of the MRF’s output is paper, the rest is glass, aluminium, steel, plastics and cardboard with a residual 6% going to waste from energy. Local authorities provide 70% of the MRF’s post consumer waste with the remainder coming from commercial and industrial premises.
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