News Roundup 

Albion Environmental Wins UK Business of the Year – Investors in People (Gold) 
It’s celebration time! Albion Environmental has won UK Business of the Year: Gold (2–49 staff) at the 2025 Investors in People Awards — a recognition of the whole team’s commitment to learning, development, and quality.

Check out our TikTok for a behind-the-scenes look at our trip to London and the moment we won! 

Fly-tippers Bury Oxfordshire Field in ‘Shocking’ Waste Mountain 
A 150-metre-long, 6-metre-high mound of illegally dumped waste has been discovered — and the cleanup is estimated to cost more than an entire council’s annual budget. With machinery clearly involved, this wasn’t a one-night job… raising big questions about enforcement and the growing gap between legal operators and criminal dumpers. 

Planet Protector Group: Sheep Wool Replacing Polystyrene? 
In Australia, wool is being transformed into high-performance, climate-friendly packaging insulation. Handling 150 tonnes a week, the product keeps temperatures below –20°C for up to 144 hours and could replace thousands of tonnes of polystyrene. Proof that nature-based solutions can beat plastic — and sometimes outperform petrochemical alternatives. 

Flintshire’s New Bin System Cuts 3,000 Tonnes of Waste to EfW 
A move to three-weekly bin collections has boosted recycling in Flintshire, with 3,000 fewer tonnes sent to the energy-from-waste plant compared to last year. While great news, Jane and Alasdair can’t help wondering—did all that extra material go into recycling streams… or end up in a field in Oxfordshire? 

A Data Centre in a Garden Shed? Yes—And It Heats the House 
A pilot “Heat Hub” project is using small data centres placed in garden outbuildings to heat nearby homes using waste heat from computers. Alasdair loves it: warm homes + local data storage + waste heat recovery = circular economy magic. 

Woman Fined £1,000 for ‘Fly-tipping Envelope’ 
At first glance, it sounded harsh. But the photos revealed the envelope was placed on top of a pile of dumped cardboard, not in a bin. As Alasdair says: personal responsibility matters — adding to someone else’s mess is still adding to the mess. 

Topic of the Week: The Waste Journey of Paper & Cardboard 

This week, Alasdair and Jane dive into the surprisingly complex world of paper and cardboard recycling — a material that most of us assume is straightforward, but which comes with its own challenges, contamination issues, and global markets. 

The UK produces 6.5 million tonnes of paper and card each year. Roughly half is recycled domestically, and the other half is exported to Europe, India, and Southeast Asia — with prices rising and falling depending on global demand. Baled cardboard earns roughly £110 per tonne and paper around £150 per tonne, but contamination can quickly turn revenue into cost. 

Using insights from industry expert Rod Patterson (Episode 66), the hosts break down the full recycling process. First stop: the MRF, where contamination remains a huge issue — nearly 20% of Scotland’s paper/card stream is non-recyclable material such as plastic, food, shredded paper, nappies, and even dog waste. Once baled, material is shipped to paper mills, where it's mixed with water to form pulp, screened, cleaned, rolled, dried, and turned back into new paper products. 

It’s a surprisingly energy- and water-intensive process — the pulp can travel 400–500 metres through a mill, losing 93% of its water along the way — but the end result is one of the true circular success stories. Paper and card become… more paper and card. No downcycling required. 

Jane reminds listeners that twin-stream collections in many councils have already improved quality, and simple household habits can make a real difference. 

As Alasdair sums up: “Paper and card is one of the materials that genuinely gets recycled. We just need to help the process along by keeping the wrong things out.”