What is Brighton Paper Round?

The company was formed in February this year as a joint venture between Magpie and Paper Round. Magpie is well known locally as they’ve been providing recycling collection for 20 years. Paper Round has a similar background but in London. It was started by Friends Of The Earth in the 1980s as a non-profit company. It expanded and was very successful and became for-profit but with a real ethical background.

What do you do?

We offer a recycling service to businesses and other organisations. We try to provide an alternative to the mixed recycling that’s offered by a lot of other companies and also provide a local option.

Has setting up the company been a smooth process?

We had a bit of a dramatic start. We’d only been running just over two months when there was a fire at the yard. We lost all our new trucks and our bailing machine. We had to act very quickly to ensure we kept all the customer collections but we did it.

And the highlights?

Recovering from the fire has actually been a positive process as it’s given us a chance to look at the way we operate. Everyone has pulled together – we couldn’t have asked for a better response. We’ve come out the other side and pretty much recovered now.

Is it true all our recycling ends up in China?

No! Certainly there’s a risk if your collection is mixed instead of separated and there have been cases where councils have been found to do that and without a very good audit trail. But we rely on reselling our materials in order to subsidise the cost of collections for customers. We need to resell it. If we threw it away we’d be charged £90 a tonne for landfill instead of making money on selling it.

Visit www.paper-round.co.uk/brighton