The recycling industry has become a significant employer and its potential to deliver economic and social benefits continues to be powerfully demonstrated paper recyclers.
Mpact Recycling partners with local entrepreneurs who help to collect recycled paper. Aside from their own operations in major centres around South Africa, they have 42 buy-back centres, where traders deliver waste paper for payment, and buys additional material from more than 90 independent dealers throughout the country. Over 40 entrepreneurial companies have also been empowered to facilitate its collection strategies, primarily involving independent collectors who collect recovered paper. Approximately 450 000 tonnes per annum of recovered paper is collected and recovered fibre is supplied to the Group’s three paper mills for processing into recycled-based cartonboard and containerboard for sale to South Africa’s packaging industry, which prevents waste paper from being disposed of in landfill sites. Recycled papers are also marketed for other industrial applications. According to the Paper Recycling Association of South Africa (PRASA), recycling work presently provides jobs for around 100 000 people in South Africa, many of whom are entrepreneurs and small business owners who rely on finding and selling sustained volumes of recycled material to earn a living. “Sustainability is key to our business and this includes contributing to the economy of the country through job creation,” says John Hunt, managing director. “A culture of recycling is emerging within our country which is having a really positive effect on poverty alleviation, enterprise development and economic growth. At the same time, there is the significant environmental benefit of reusing a valuable resource and preventing the landfilling or incineration of used paper. “However, in an industry that is traditionally difficult to break into, our main differentiator is that fact that we provide a guaranteed market for all grades of waste paper.”To ensure that local recycling entrepreneurs are equipped to succeed and grow, Mpact Recycling is able to provide and install equipment such as paperbalers at its buy-back centres. These machines compress waste paper into cubes or bales, which helps the buy-back centre owners to increase the volumes they are able to process and to reduce the time it takes to do so. The technology also allows the centres to process and store more waste paper, effectively increasing the volume of their sales.
