Not a wasted opportunity

Nov 10 2009 by Kelley Price, Evening Gazette

Chances are you poured your milk this morning from a carton containing material recycled on Teesside. Kelley Price met the man turning HDPE pellets into pound signs.

JAMES Donaldson has never been one to back down when the going gets tough.

The man behind a world first in recycling, developed on Teesside, is only just starting to reap the rewards of his labours after years of hard work.

His Wilton-based company, WES - acquired in 2007 by UK waste management firm Greenstar - created the first commercially produced 100% high density polyethlene (HDPE) pellet, now used in products too numerous to mention.

From humble beginnings in his spare bedroom, James has grown the operation into a world-class recycling business, on track to reach £13m turnover next year.

Thanks to him, anything from crisp packets to car scrap can be turned into recycled virgin-quality material to be reused by industry.

As of this month, his HDPE pellet can be found in one million milk cartons on breakfast tables across the UK.

“My original business plan was way bigger than this, but such is the naivety of youth,” laughs James.

A chemical engineer by profession, he quickly discovered he didn’t like working for other people and by the time he was 25 had set up Waste Exchange Services, working out of the Stockton Enterprise Centre.

It was 1993 and the first shoots of the recycling industry as we know it today were starting to appear, but not many companies were tackling the more complicated materials.

“Back then, there was lots of easy stuff being done in recycling,” said James. “I thought there was a gap to tackle the harder stuff and find new areas that other people didn’t do. Mine was more of an engineering approach.

“We are the only waste management company that collects the milk bottle from the bin and sorts it and upgrades it ready to become a new bottle.”

Super-stringent UK food safety regulations were one of the biggest hurdles - the sheer amount of hoop-jumping could be the main reason he was the first to succeed where others have failed.

But the company is certainly enjoying the spoils of global acclaim now, after scooping a string of top awards - most notably the Queen’s Award for Enterprise earlier this year.

“The Queen’s award was the real high point, the one we’re most proud of,” says James.

“I shook Her Majesty’s hand but didn’t get a long conversation with her. The whole event was very slick, the British establishment at it’s best. It made you proud.”

But James isn’t resting on his laurels.

“We have to make sure that whatever people do with their milk cartons, we have processes to cope so there’s absolutely no food safety risk at all. And we have to constantly deliver that on a daily basis.

“We’ve spent a full year building the confidence of the supermarkets and bottle producers. They’re all very rigorous and it takes time.”

A focused approach has been the company’s hallmark from day one.

“We only do recycling,” says James, “that’s our raison d’etre. We don’t deal with landfill.

“We do it because that’s the right thing to do but also it protects our long-term prosperity. Our rivals aren’t set up like that, they are moving into recycling. The only way to succeed in the future is to turn waste back into something you can sell.”

The Tees Valley has come full circle from its days as one of Europe’s leading plastics producers to a leading recycler of plastic material - but it’s no great surprise to James.

“They’re very similar sectors,” he says. “They’re both heavy industry. We need to encourage more people like us to come to Wilton. The Tees Valley has the right sort of skill sector. But recycling isn’t on the same scale as manufacturing was - yet.”

A fierce champion of the Tees Valley, James lives in Yarm with his three daughters and has no plans to move from the area.

He refuses to take all the recognition for the company’s success, preferring to credit his hard-working team.

“I sit in an ivory tower, they do all the work,” he jokes. “We have a staff of 75. It’s a real team effort, they work very hard. You need to have people you trust to do the job.

“An idea is only as good as the people that deliver it. I’m good at the theory, but people would run a mile if I picked up a spanner.”

The much talked-about HDPE pellet was one of Greenstar’s goals, when the UK-wide waste company acquired WES in March 2007.

The partnership was mutually beneficial. It gave James access to infrastructure and investment that wasn’t available before, while Greenstar looked to WES to deliver solutions - “Particularly with long-term recycling contracts, so they can stay in the UK rather than go to China,” says James.

And what about the future?

“The latest plant was commissioned in April 2008 and we are still not remotely at full capacity nearly a year later - I want to see the plant at full capacity, doing what it’s supposed to do, so we will keep on building.

“We are looking at the cosmetics market and new waste streams. There’s lots of work still to be done, but it’s been a very interesting trip so far.”