Brighton Paper Round sponsors The Big Debate: State of the City 2013

The Brighton Chamber is pleased to announce that local recycling firm Brighton Paper Round will be sponsoring our State of the City debate on Tuesday, July 9.

To help you get to know our sponsors a bit better, we spoke to managing director Darren Hedges to find out more about the company’s work.

“Paper Round exercises what we call real recycling solutions for businesses. We try to find the most ethical and closed-loop recycling solutions,” says Darren.

The firm recycles office waste ranging from paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, glass and cans to batteries and IT equipment. 

Brighton Paper Round also offers a variety of other services, such as shredding, food waste recycling, and a disposal service that sees non-recyclable waste used to generate electricity at an energy-from-waste plant.

The company’s emphasis is on finding ‘closed-loop’ methods of recycling; the example Darren gives to explain what this means is office copy paper: “One hundred per cent of office paper is recycled back into office paper.”

Finding innovative recycling methods are at the heart of Paper Round’s ethos. Darren gives the example of food waste, which is shipped in bulk to an anaerobic digestion plant. The digestion process produces a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide, which is stored to be burnt as renewable energy. Nothing is wasted, as the compost material generated from this process is used to fertilise crops.

Brighton Paper Round was established in 2011 as a joint enterprise between local recycling group Magpie and the London ethical recycling company Paper Round, which started life as a purely charitable venture set up by Friends of the Earth in 1988.

“We have tried to maintain that co-operative feel,” says Darren, “the staff are the public face of the business.”

Brighton Paper Round employs local staff and has a sorting facility based near the city. Is it important for firms to support the local economy in this way?

“Absolutely; I think it’s essential,” says Darren, “for very selfish reasons, the business would not survive if it was detrimental to the local economy.”

What is more, companies can provide a boost to the local area whilst also building their own profile, as Darren notes: “Businesses that behave in a way that gives something back to the community are seen as more professional and valid businesses.”

He also identifies one feature of Brighton that is both its greatest asset and its biggest drawback as a place to do business: “Disadvantages are the sea; you can only go north, east and west. The advantages are the sea, because it attracts a lot of people down here to do business with.”

“I think the reason why [we wanted to sponsor State of the City] was because Brighton has a reputation as being a green city. The city’s waste strategy is obviously something that’s very high profile,” explains Darren.

He adds that the company felt sponsoring the event would be “a good way of communicating to the city that improving the way it manages its waste would benefit the city.”

Darren reveals that Brighton Paper Round’s aims for the future are to spread the ‘real recycling’ message “wider and louder over the next 12 months to Brighton, Hove and the surrounding areas and to expand [its] services into Crawley to encompass the whole of the ‘Gatwick Diamond’.”

Brighton has a reputation for being “a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of thinking about the environment”, according to Darren. If one of Brighton Paper Round’s aims is to enhance this reputation, then it seems well-placed to deliver.

• Come and speak to Darren in person at The Big Debate: State of the City 2013, Tuesday, 9 July. For more information, or to book your free place, please visit our event page here.

Written by Rosalind Branagan
@rsb_2013
www.jwtrainee.wordpress.com

If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk