With landfill taxes topping £50 a tonne, a green-minded Teessider is on a mission to help firms cut their waste bill. Jez Davison reports.
PACKAGING expert Tim Hutchinson doesn’t buy into the Renew, Reuse, Recycle mantra espoused by a vast army of green campaigners.
The co-founder of Wilton packaging firm Outpace says the slogan misses out an important fourth dimension: reducing the amount of waste we produce in the first place.
His canny Carrierpac invention - a reusable protective wrap for delivering kitchen worktops to customers’ homes - is designed to do just that and has turned the heads of national retailers.
DIY giant B&Q has saved an estimated £1m a year since abandoning its disposable cardboard wrap in favour of the Carrierpac in 2008.
The product has also allowed the firm to cut carbon by more than 3,000 tonnes and remove the problem of what to do with the 1,100 tonnes of cardboard it previously generated each year.
The Government is cracking down on firms that leave a lengthy waste trail behind them.
Landfill taxes went up from £48 to £56 per tonne last month and are set to hit £80 within four years.
That, says Hutchinson, should be a good enough reason for bosses to think long and hard about their environmental footprint.
“The emphasis should be on reducing packaging as much as possible, then on recycling the waste we do produce,” the Guisborough-born entrepreneur said.
“Legislation is forcing us to think more deeply about our waste streams.
“Reduce, renew, recycle was just a mantra but it’s going to become law.”
EU and UK legislation is effectively making it more expensive for companies to produce waste - but it seems that industry has not yet cottoned on.
Each year commercial and industrial firms in the North-east leave behind 2.18m tonnes of waste - with Teesside contributing 680,853 tonnes or 31% of the total.
While some of the waste is converted into energy and raw materials for everyday products, a staggering 33% is still tossed to landfill despite Government warnings of higher taxes.
The financial penalties make it easier for Hutchinson to sell the benefits of Longspac, a 3m long polypropylene box that can cut cardboard packaging usage by 400 tonnes a year.
Along with the Carrierpac, it has helped reduce B&Q’s transit damage rate - in layman’s speak, the proportion of products damaged in transportation - to under 1%.
Hutchinson started touting for B&Q’s business after it was grilled on TV programme Watchdog in 2004.
“I was watching the programme one night and they were having a lot of problems in delivering worktops to customers.
“They were very poorly packaged and were damaged as a result.
“The company was also taking eight weeks to re-deliver a worktop.”