Visit to re-cycling plant

As mentioned in a previous article I visited the Shotton paper mill with a group of Councillors to see what happened to the paper that local residents put in their bins to be re-cycled.

The re-cycling plant is on the old site of the Shotton steel works - which we learnt on the visit has the grim distinction of being the works that has had more people laid off in one day than anywhere else in the UK - 11,000 when the steel works shut down.

The process begins with lorry loads of waste paper being brought into vast aircraft style hangars - see pictures above - and is then processed into usable paper.

What was memorable about the visit was the scale of the operation. 500,000 tonnes of paper is re-cycled each year. The plant never shuts down and recovers 640,000 tonnes of paper a year which equates to 12,500 tonnes a week on average. Wigan's contribution takes up just 4.5 days of the re-cycling process.

The other thing that was noticeable was how automated everything was. The plant employed 450 people in total but everything we saw was done by computer from the loading of the paper into the cleaning machines to the exact cutting up into orders for customers.