At its height, 50 firefighters were at the Chatham Dockyard site in North Kent after thousands of tonnes of paper caught fire on Tuesday evening.

A spokeswoman for Kent Fire and Rescue Service said three pumps still remained at the scene on the morning of 13 August.

It is understood that Holmen Paper, Korsnäs and Norske Skog have contracts with the company.

A Holmen Paper spokesman said he was aware that the fire had now been put out. Around 500 tonnes of the wood-paper manufacturer’s waste paper has been affected. However, no damage or disruption has been caused to the company’s Grade A paper.

He said: There was just a small restriction because of the fire engines in the area, but it is now all back to normal.

Norske Skog managing director Stephen Howell said it had a long-term contract with Nordic Forest Terminal (NTF), which is a division within the Nordic group.

The fire at Nordic Recycling had no effect on reels stored at NFT on behalf of Norske Skog and subsequently has had no impact on our daily operations.

In a newsletter on Nordic’s website, it said that in the year to date tonnage handled through Chatham up to the end of July 2007 was 106,336 tonnes against 112,781 tonnes for the same period a year earlier.

The newsletter also recorded that in 2006, there were seven accidents at NFT and Nordic Recycling from 1 January to 31 July 2006 and nine accidents in the same period in 2007.

For the same period in 2007, there were 34 incidents at the two divisions, compared with four incidents the same time a year earlier.

Nordic Recycling was established in 1995 and is said to be the largest single waste paper processing site in the UK, with a 6,000-tonnes-per-week processing capability.

It services waste contracts in both the public and the private sectors and operates from an 18-acre site.