In-depth interview with MRW

Late last year Andrea Lockerbie from MRW interviewed our Managing Director, Joseph Doherty and you can read what he had to say below.

Based in Newry in Northern Ireland, Re-Gen Waste is a family business set up in 2004 by managing director Joseph Doherty and his two brothers, all engineers and equal shareholders.

Doherty, who recently received fellowship status from the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management, recalls that, on setting up the business, they “knew nothing about waste”, having come from a construction background. But in the 16 years since, the family has built up a business that now has 250 staff, its own fleet of more than 100 trailers, and processes around 300,000 tonnes a year of waste.

Half of its tonnage is dry mixed recyclables which are processed at its MRF and the other half is municipal solid waste (MSW) processed at its residual waste plant. The company creates refuse-derived fuel and solid recovered fuel (SRF) at its new SRF plant built last year. Hav­ing its own transport, storage and sorting means it has full control over the whole operation and ensures that it can focus on customer service.

Whilst the majority of Re-Gen’s business is con­tracted, they also have some merchant. Its merchant capacity has allowed it to step in to help coun­cils in times of need. Recent examples include Wigan, Bradford and Cheshire East, which both experi­enced dramatic spikes in recyclables put out for collection during the lockdown. While its roots are in Northern Ireland, the company has an eye on England in terms of securing more waste and recyclates, as well as using its experience to establish a new MRF in England.

Doherty recounts that, when Re-Gen first built its MRF, it did not have enough recyclable materials because it was early days for house­hold recycling schemes. This led to it acquiring customers from not just Northern Ireland, but also the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and England.

“That is why, whenever we talk about Brexit, we have a geographical spread across all regions of the UK and Ireland, so it gives us an ability to see what the effects will be,” Doherty comments. He foresees issues with customs and environmental paperwork. But the busi­ness already has systems in place for this, due to incoming material from Ireland.

What may be more of a problem is any red tape pushed by the EU as it looks to protect its land border: “Westminster has a softer approach to it, but we are caught in the negoti­ations and that is the problem with this. For us as a business, we want to be able to plan, but we cannot plan until we know what is going to happen. But we don’t know what will happen because negotiations are probably going to run until the 11th hour. We all have to be ready for whatever scenario comes, along.”

Another major Brexit impact will be on labour. “The waste industry depends a lot on low-skill labour…but we couldn’t get local peo­ple to do picking,” he says, adding that the industry will get a shock when the points-based system for immigration comes in on 1 January 2021. Northern Ireland will be hit hard, as it has a much smaller population than England.

“Northern Ireland will have the added disadvantage that we compete with the Republic of Ireland [for labour] and they will have access to people coming from eastern Europe, whereas we won’t,” he says. “It risks creating that vacuum towards the Republic, and possi­bly a vacuum for a lot of industry to the Repub­lic from the UK as a whole.”

Re-Gen is focused on household waste, so its customers are primarily councils from across the UK. The excep­tion is material from Ireland, where household waste is collected by private waste operators.

Doherty says that while Scotland does have processing capacity, its decision to go dual-stream – where paper and cardboard are col­lected separately from other recyclables – perhaps undermined confidence in investment in recycling plants in Scotland. He points to this as an example of policy-makers “getting too involved” and creating a lack of confidence in the market.

Doherty says there is variation in the material that comes in on a regional as well as a council basis. From dual-stream collections, he says there is around 15% contamination in the paper stream, and they still see paper in the mixed recycling stream which should be paper-free: “That means it has to be re-sorted, so the advantage of having it separate from all other materials isn’t an advantage.”

The company has been sorting mixed recy­clables with glass for 12 years in its MRF, which Doherty says causes no issues because the plant was adapted to make it work. He puts forward that the quality argument “isn’t just about qual­ity – it is also about control of the materials” by reprocessors. He adds that the industry needs to be prepared to invest in its plants and tech­nology, and agrees that “MRFs that are badly run do produce bad quality” so councils need to choose good MRF partners.

Doherty says that to get the most from household recycling, the collection system should be as simple as possible and the technol­ogy should be maximised to produce the quality needed by reprocessors.

“But that debate has to happen between the reprocessor and the MRF on who does that. I think the Government doesn’t have a right to step into that discussion – that is a discussion that needs to be commercial,” he says.

He explains that its glass output “isn’t what some people want but it is what others want”, so it is a case of finding the right outlets. One of its main destinations for glass is a plant in Belgium that will sort the glass for use as con­tainer remelt. With paper, there is a general standard of 1.5% contamination, but Doherty also sells fibre to those who need less than 0.5% contamination, and he will produce material to meet that specification if required, at a cost. He sees this as the way business should work – that you pay extra for the higher quality.

While the company tries to use local outlets and reprocessors as much as possible, Doherty says there simply is not the capacity locally, so he has to look for outlets further afield. That said, he thinks the future of the waste industry is developing more local capacity, particularly products from paper and plastic: “We are devel­oping outlets that would be local to Northern Ireland…we will be in the next 18 months, hopefully, be bringing that to market.”

The business has its own R&D team which is constantly looking at where processes and efficiencies can be improved. It developed its own glass clean-up plant, while its engineering arm develops bespoke equipment, runs trials, builds trailers and largely constructed the SRF plant – meaning the firm has a plant that it knows is easy to manage.

The business embraces technology. When the SRF plant was built, a special camera sys­tem was put in to combat fire risk. The whole area is monitored, with macro cameras looking at the plant and micro visuals on the shredder and conveyors. Alarms are set to trigger when temperatures rise to certain levels, so the oper­ator can deal with the issue straight away.

Re-Gen has also incorporated an electric crane in a bid to try to run on electricity as much as possible and move away from diesel, for which costs will soon rise following Govern­ment plans to scrap the lower rate of fuel duty on red diesel from April 2022.

Doherty said this has also given it the oppor­tunity to design self-loading cranes, similar to those used in energy-from-waste plants, where grabs are set up with a digital system to lift the waste. Re-Gen is currently developing the dig­ital system, but the aim is to load the plant without anyone driving the machines.

Using technology to manage data is another area the business is focusing on and the com­pany has a data analyst. Doherty says there is plenty of scope to pull together the data it gen­erates in a better way, then use it to develop the business and help with decision-making. On top of that, he sees a role for artificial intel­ligence systems to interrogate the data and “connect things that the human brain hasn’t got the capacity to”.

“Eventually I see all of our business being run from a central command centre where you have got all your cameras, whether it is a heat cam­era or a normal camera, and your data coming in from the machines. Then, you are starting to become more like a car manufacturer on the process line – the waste industry is getting to that point where it is so sophisticated.