Date: 29 April, 2010
Natural World Products (NWP) has been awarded a £75million contract by arc21 to help Councils recycle household waste....
Northern Ireland’s ability to meet stringent EU recycling targets took a major step forward with the formal announcement of a multi-million pound contract awarded to a leading recycling company to collect and recycle over a third of all organic household waste produced locally.
Recycling company Natural World Products (NWP) based in Portadown have been awarded a £75 million contract by arc21, the waste management group representing 11 councils in the east of Northern Ireland tasked with encouraging households to recycle. It is expected that up to twenty new jobs will be created by NWP in Belfast as a result of the new business.
NWP Director, Caolan Woods, said: “The value of arc21 is that it allows councils to collaborate in a way that wasn’t previously possible in order to collectively meet the challenges of waste management in an environmental and cost effective way.
“As a business, we continue to experience rapid growth built on our investment in world leading technology, an experienced and skilled management team and a commitment to excellence in everything that we do. This new contract illustrates our capabilities as a recycling company to process what are significant volumes of organic waste.
“We will be recycling everything from scraps of meat, vegetables and fruit to garden clippings through a process known as in-vessel composting which is a sealed process with strict environmental controls to accelerate the composting process. The result is high quality compost which is sold as Rosey Lee compost through garden centres throughout the island of Ireland. It’s also used as top soil by some of Ireland’s leading golf courses.”
The 15-year deal will result in over 70,000 tonnes of organic waste such as garden clippings and food waste being collected and recycled every year.
Alderman Hubert Nicholl, Chairman of arc21, welcomed the arrangement with NWP as an important step towards improving recycling performance:
“Our partnership with NWP is ensuring that more waste collected from households across the arc21 region is being recycled instead of going to landfill, marking a significant step towards arc21 meeting its recycling target of at least 50% by 2020.
“The introduction of new infrastructure and treatment capacity operating under strict environmental controls will help arc21’s constituent councils adopt a managed incremental approach to support householders in their efforts to recycle more.”
The new recycling services will ensure that councils avoid landfill charges as well meeting EU recycling obligations in order to avoid hefty fines. It is expected that the environmental benefits from recycling the organic waste will reduce harmful CO² emissions by approximately 50,000 tonnes annually, the equivalent of taking 12,000 cars off the road each year.
arc21 and NWP also have long-term plans to build an advanced recycling facility to process organic waste. The arc21 deal is the largest waste management contract of its kind to be awarded through a competitive tendering process in Northern Ireland.
