St Regis - The UK's largest manufacturer and recycler of paper

Press Release

20th January 2009

St Regis begins production of K-light

After eleven months of intensive preparation and an investment of £104 million, St Regis is pleased to announce the launch of K-light, the first high quality lightweight paper to be manufactured in the UK.

St Regis began producing K-light on its high tech paper machine (capacity of 260,000 tonnes) at Kemsley Mill on 12th January 2009. The arrival of this light, strong and consistent paper gives customers a reliable, secure, UK-based source of lighter weight flutings and liners, enabling them to lightweight board and boxes with confidence.

As K-light is 100% recycled and recyclable, customers can improve profits and green credentials at the same time. Using K-light, customers can maintain the strength of their boxes but use less fibre. This can create significant savings, easing margins and potentially increasing profit.

The trend towards lightweighting is now well established, driven by factors such as retail ready packaging and the need to minimise packaging. The market for lightweight papers is expected to continue to show healthy growth.

With flutings at 90 gsm and liners at 100 gsm, the K-light range is manufactured on a converted fine paper machine that has tight controls and tolerances throughout to ensure the paper is made within very fine parameters. The machine has been equipped with a new press section that allows improved drying across the sheet to ensure consistency and excellent runnability on customers’ corrugators. Advanced pre-drying controls reduce tension in the sheet to minimise the possibility of breaks. All this adds up to an advanced paper machine that can produce one of the highest quality lightweight papers in Europe. Initial customer trials have gone very well, with K-light superior to the best imported lightweight papers in terms of runnability and strength.

There has been a heavyweight investment in this lightweight paper. DS Smith Plc acquired new site facilities from M-real at the cost of £67 million in February 2008. Since then a further £37 million has been spent on building a whole new infrastructure. Kemsley Mill now has one of the most technically advanced stock preparation plants in Europe incorporating highly sophisticated fractionation, screening and reject handling processes. The 6.9 metres wide paper machine was rebuilt and is now capable of producing just under a kilometre of high quality lightweight paper every minute.

The whole project took just eleven months from acquisition to commercial supply.  New warehousing, a state-of-the-art effluent plant, advanced de-inking facilities and a highly energy efficient on site power plant all contribute to making Kemsley the UK’s most modern and efficient papermaking plant.

For more information contact:

Mike Churchman 01628 639404

Nick Britton 01628 583330

Editor’s notes:

St Regis is the UK’s largest manufacturer and recycler of paper.

With four paper mills and a Head Office in Maidenhead, our turnover is more than £300 million per annum. We employ c.1700 people.

Our annual output of recycled paper is in the region of 1.2 million tonnes, making us by far the largest papermaker in the UK. The annual input of recovered waste paper is around 1.3 million tonnes, which means we are one of the biggest recycling operations in Europe. In fact, a major environmental benefit of K-light’s launch is that recycling on the Kemsley site will increase by over 30%. The high quality recovered paper will be supplied by Severnside, part of the DS Smith group.

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Recycling boost at Kemsley Mill

Already one of Europe’s leading paper recycling sites, since the January 09 launch of the new high quality 100% recycled lightweight paper, K-light, Kemsley Mill has increased its consumption of recovered waste paper by over 30%.

This means that our total consumption of recycled paper has risen to 1.3 million tonnes every year, approximately a quarter of all the paper recycled in the UK.

The vast majority of our paper goes into making corrugated case materials, or corrugated board. The recycling record of this material is excellent. Over 84% of all corrugated used in the UK is recycled. It is estimated that every four months this prevents an area of board the size of Greater London going to landfill.

All our recovered paper is supplied by our sister company, Severnside, the largest recycler in Europe, harvesting circa 1.9 million tonnes of paper and packaging annually from UK waste streams.

For more information contact:

Mike Churchman 01628 639404

Editor’s notes:

St Regis is the UK’s largest manufacturer and recycler of paper.

With four paper mills and a Head Office in Maidenhead, our turnover is more than £300 million per annum. We employ c.1700 people.

Our annual output of recycled paper is in the region of 1.2 million tonnes, making us by far the largest papermaker in the UK. The annual input of recovered waste paper is around 1.3 million tonnes, which means we are one of the biggest recycling operations in Europe. In fact, a major environmental benefit of K-light’s launch is that recycling on the Kemsley site will increase by over 30%. The high quality recovered paper will be supplied by Severnside, part of the DS Smith group.

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St Regis sees red over brown paper bans

‘Misguided’ and ‘badly thought through’ are just some of the descriptions St Regis has recently applied to moves to ban brown paper bags in shops and brown paper envelopes in the postal system.

The original proposal to ban paper bags (as well as plastic) was contained in the London Local Authorities (Shopping Bags) Bill. Had the proposals in this bill been accepted then every shopper would need to take his or her own bags with them to buy clothes, gifts or even pharmaceuticals. Purchasers of take-away food would have needed to become adept at juggling hot and possibly slightly greasy purchases without the aid of a paper bag to keep them all together!

In November 2008, London Councils dropped their bid to force retailers in the capital to remove or charge for bags after Government reassured them it was acting to reduce their use. We will now need to watch carefully any clauses introduced into the forthcoming Climate Change Bill.

Meanwhile, in January 2009, the Royal Mail issued guidelines under the PAS 2020 environmental standard which has threatened to ban brown paper envelopes in the postal system. We are vigorously contesting this proposal through the relevant industry associations.

We have a direct interest in the progress of these issues. We manufacture bag papers at our mill in Wansbrough, Somerset. We believe that our products have strong environmental credentials.

All St Regis bags are made from 100% recycled waste paper. The machine on which the bags are made uses annually up to 45000 tonnes of waste paper which might otherwise find its way to landfill. The bags themselves are 100% recyclable.

For more information contact:

Mike Churchman 01628 639404

Editor’s notes:

St Regis is the UK’s largest manufacturer and recycler of paper.

With four paper mills and a Head Office in Maidenhead, our turnover is more than £300 million per annum. We employ c.1700 people.

Our annual output of recycled paper is in the region of 1.2 million tonnes, making us by far the largest papermaker in the UK. The annual input of recovered waste paper is around 1.3 million tonnes, which means we are one of the biggest recycling operations in Europe. In fact, a major environmental benefit of K-light’s launch is that recycling on the Kemsley site will increase by over 30%. The high quality recovered paper will be supplied by Severnside, part of the DS Smith group.

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