Waste recycling firm is powering ahead
ALMOST a year since the opening of one of the province's most advanced waste handling facilities, Portadown-based firm Natural World Products continues to expand its reach into recycling and is proof that even in the current economic climate there are opportunities for growth, employment and expanding revenues.
That’s not to say that NWP has simply walked into the burgeoning industry; its roots go back to the mid-80s when Brendan Woods began experimenting with mushroom compost.
At that time, Woods might have been seen as a somewhat eccentric character, but his visits to more advanced countries such as Germany, Holland, Belgium and even the US led to him to import composting technology and, with initial backing from some local councils, he began recycling green waste into compost.
Sold under the Rosey Lee brand, the firm now produces 40-50,000 tonnes a year from three sites including the new plant at Glenside in west Belfast.
As an indication of how far the industry has come, that 6 million site was officially opened and widely praised by Environment Minister Edwin Poots as a shining example of entrepreneurship in a vital sector.
Today the business as a whole employs 64 people and has a turnover in the region of 10-12 million.
As well as dealing with the individual councils, NPW also works with organisations such as SWAMP and ARC21, established to deal with waste on a multi-authority basis.
Swamp, for example, represents eight councils including Fermanagh, Omagh, Armagh and Newry and Mourne, while ARC21 works with 11 authorities on the east coast from Antrim and Larne to Down and Ards.
Already, NWP has a contract with ARC 21 for organic waste which was secured in 2008. It’s a 15 year deal worth around 75 million and involves the treatment of around 70,000 tonnes of waste per annum but that’s relatively small compared to what could lie ahead.
“There’s two other main contracts that we’re tendering for at the moment,” says finance director Ciaran Doherty.
“We are tendering in partnership with various consortia and one would be the ARC21 residual contract and the other would be the SwaMP residual contract.
“The residual contract is the household waste and the civic amenity waste and they have been put out to tender at the moment. ARC21 has put there’s out and it’s a 25 year contract which will be awarded in Q3/4 next year.
“Over the term of the contract that’s worth something like a 1 billion. SWaMP would be the same term at 25 years but it’s a bit less because there’s simply less waste.”
Clearly the potential for growth is huge even though NWP’s share is a percentage the total sums involved.
In the meantime, however, Doherty prefers to the focus on the here and now but even then the plans are ambitious.
Planned development should bring 25-30 more jobs in the near future and there are other plans afoot.
Another area where the business hopes to see significant growth is the commercial sector where firms are increasingly seeing the financial and marketing benefits of a robust green policy.
“To be honest it’s a market that we’ve only started getting into in the last 12 months,” says Doherty.
“Given the technologies that we have on board both in Portadown and also in Keady, none of our competitors in the commercial sector can offer that level of technology, so we believe there’s an opportunity there for us.”
Part of that process is also expanding the NWP ‘brand’.
“If you take the Belfast and greater Belfast area, NWP would not be a name that people would recognise or be aware of and that’s something that we are working on.
Nevertheless, clients so far include Belfast’s Merchant Hotel and the majority of the McDonalds restaurants in the province and around 1 million worth of business has been secured overall in the past six to seven months.
All of that pales somewhat against the firm’s long term strategy however.
“One very, very strong direction that the company would like to go down is the energy route and renewable energies and so forth and producing fuels.
“The one thing that would make us slightly different from firms looking to get involved in fuels is that for all these things to happen they need the raw materials and the one difference with us is that we can go to potential funders and say: ‘We have the raw materials for the next 15 years’.
“From NWP’s perspective I would to think that somewhere between five and 10 years from now we’ll be known as a energy company. We’re looking at fuels, wind turbines and that is most definitely the road that we’re keen to go down and will go down.”
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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