The Environment Exchange has announced plans to branch into the recovered materials market by launching an online marketplace for buying and selling recovered paper.
And, it has indicated that recovered material markets could become the main focus of its business which up until now has concentrated on providing a trading platform for packaging waste recovery notes (PRNs) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment evidence notes (WENs).
The Edinburgh-based company, known as t2e, told letsrecycle.com today (January 31) that it was hoping to launch the trading platform for Old Corrugated Cardboard (OCC) and Old Newspaper and Pamphlets (ONP) on March 1.
The marketplace will enable what t2e described as ‘smart, simple and safe’ trading via standardised contracts, price transparency, settlement, and dispute resolution.
Angus Macpherson, t2e founder and managing director, said that his decision to branch into the recovered material marketplace had not been influenced by competitors such as scrap-ex, which provides a centralised trading platform for a number of secondary materials including paper, glass and plastics, alongside PRNs.
He explained that his intention when first setting up t2e in the late 1990s had been to branch into the recovered materials markets and that he had just been waiting for the right time.
He said: “We have been looking at this in detail over the last 18 months and nothing anyone else has been doing has pre-empted this move.
“If we can get this right we hope to expand into other recovered materials which was my vision when I first set up t2e. In time that is likely to be our main focus as secondary markets are much bigger than compliance markets. It’s very exciting.”
Paper
Paper was chosen, Mr Macpherson said, because it was a market which interested him and because t2e was already well known in the sector because paper PRNs made up the largest proportion of the PRN market.
