The mill is the largest recycled paper plant in the country, and used to produce newsprint, but now has a focus on sustainability and recycling. Zeenia Naqvee reports.
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00:00The UK's largest paper mill is in Sittingbourne and this year,
00:03Kemsley Paper Mill celebrates its 100th anniversary.
00:06The industrial site, which is spread over 150 acres,
00:10runs three paper mills and used to be a major Fleet Street printing hub,
00:14powered by Scandinavian timber when it was first set up in 1924.
00:19But in 2024, things in Europe's second largest mill
00:23look a little bit different.
00:25Since the 80s and 90s, their focus has been on sustainability.
00:29It's said that the mill produces enough recycled paper in a year
00:33to wrap around the entire world twice.
00:36They say that for every tonne of paper they make from recycling,
00:39there's an entire tree that doesn't have to be used.
00:42Everything we make here is fully recycled.
00:45Even the white papers that we make here are from a recycled material,
00:48so we're giving that valuable fibre another life.
00:51We're also looking really heavily into how we can make lighter papers,
00:55higher performance papers that use less fibre for the same application.
00:59We have robots that are automatically moving the paper around.
01:02They pick the order automatically for the customer
01:04and the guys on the pork trucks will load that for the customer deliveries today.
01:08So we've got a workforce here that quite a few are retiring,
01:10quite a few of the guys here in their late 50s, early 60s,
01:13so actually we had people that just retired through that programme
01:15and then we had the robots in the warehouse in their place.
01:18To recycle the paper, staff crush it before mixing it with water and starch,
01:23which is stored in on-site silo towers to clean and strengthen the paper.
01:28It's tinted with the same greyish-brown hue for consistency
01:31and is rolled into sheets of paper before being distributed to their plants across the UK,
01:36where they often end up as cardboard boxes for packaging across various sectors.
01:41Kemsley Paper Mill recycled two and a half thousand tonnes of paper every single day,
01:45which they cleaned so that it ends up looking like this.
01:49Sittingbourne, I think initially, paper making started because
01:52you had the chalk streams running down, so a supply of water,
01:59and they needed water to make the paper.
02:02Initially they'd have used rags as the raw material.
02:06I think paper making started there somewhere like maybe 300 years ago,
02:12but it wasn't until about 150 years ago that it got serious
02:18and a new mill was built in Sittingbourne.
02:21The mills say they've reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 50% in the last few years,
02:26but hope to reduce this even further to keep the site going for at least another 100 years.
02:32Xenia Nakvi for KMTV in Sittingbourne.