By way of a brief follow-up to yesterday's blog about issues with the quality of recycled waste streams, I subsequently had a most illuminating conversation with Will Stone at UPM about the firm's new materials recovery and recycling facility (MRF) at Shotton.

One of the main drivers for UPM's multi-million investment in this facility was ensuring they were able to control the quality of materials for their paper mill, given the increasing trend for local authorities to adopt co-mingled recycling collections and UPM's concerns about the standard of some of the sorted material they were receiving.

As UPM knows exactly what sort of quality is required for the recycled paper to be usable, it was in the perfect position to specify what could be described as "the ultimate behemoth" when it comes to a MRF.

UPM also spends a lot of time with councils and their collection partners advising them on how to build and operate MRFs that will produce similarly high-end recyclate. They've even gone so far as to create a "mini-MRF" testing station for councils to experiment with. But even doing all of that, the quality received from third-party inputs still needs to improve.

Hearing the details about how UPM is already achieving a 95-98% recovery rate at its giant new facility was awesome and awe-inspiring. Fantastic stuff, as is the fact that UPM's MRF is not your typical dark and ugly shed, but has large windows so employees can work in natural light.

It sounds like some sort recycling utopia, and a trip to Deeside needs to be diarised in order to take in the full majesty of this wonder of the modern MRF world.