Paper Mountain

When BioRegional MiniMills and its innovative paper plant design won best invention at The Observer’s second annual ethical awards, it was hardly a controversial choice.  Given how much harm the paper industry inflicts on the environment, reducing just a small percentage could make a big impact. But the company and its managing director, Sue Riddlestone, aren’t interested in small percentages – their goal is to revolutionise the way the paper industry works.

BioRegional MiniMills has set itself a target of helping build 74 of its environmentally-friendly, energy-efficient mills over 10 years to produce 1.66 million tonnes of pulp per annum. It says this would avert the need to harvest from 1.4 million hectares of natural forest, an area the size of Cornwall, Devon and Somerset combined. Just as important, its designs will help paper companies reduce the costs of their waste processes and plough resources back into the paper-making cycle. To achieve this, it’s gathered together some of the leading lights from the paper industry as shareholders and board members. Over its ten-year existence, grant funding has enabled the company to make considerable progress and prove its concept in the lab. With the help of g2i, the company successfully secured a sizeable investment from an angel investor to fund the development of a prototype and start to commercialise the concept.

Taking paper for granted

Riddlestone concedes that she didn’t start out with a commercial perspective. A former nurse, she wanted to help reduce the impact we have on the environment and specifically targeted the paper industry, which accounts for a tenth of the world’s industrial energy consumption and four tenths of the industrial wood harvest. Pressure is only going to increase on forests from all resources and in the UK, paper consumption now counts for 6% of our ecological footprint and paper use continues to rise, particularly in developing countries.

“We’re all surrounded by paper and we just take it for granted,” she says. “But it has a big impact because it’s a very energy intensive process.” While recycling is helping, there’s still a significant requirement for virgin pulp in the paper industry, and this is what BioRegional MiniMills is targeting. Its aim is to make mills more friendly to the local environment, reducing their energy and water usage and recycling the chemicals and energy back into the process.

Pulp mills tend to be huge plants and produce a ‘black liquor’ effluent which has to be treated, using technology which hasn’t changed much since the 1930s. Raw materials – straw or wood – only have about 40% cellulose in them: the rest is cooked out using caustic soda or sulphur to form the effluent, using technology that hasn’t fundamentally changed since the 1930s. By developing a way of recovering the energy and chemicals from the black liquor on a small scale, BioRegional MiniMills argues that it’s paving the way for a new wave of small mills to produce paper, using local materials such as straw and wood mill offcuts. “That’s the revolutionary part of it; it would allow paper mills to be a tenth of the size they are, and that means they could use whatever materials are available locally,” says Riddlestone.

Search for funding

Spun out of not-for-profit incubator Bioregional Development Group, where Riddlestone is also a director, the company initially looked to form a partnership to take advantage of existing technologies. Surprisingly, however, it discovered that there was no clean technology in this sector – so Riddlestone decided to invent it. Tying up with inventor Trevor Dean, who’s worked in the paper industry all his career, she argues that the combination of her vision and Dean’s ideas, supported by people who put the ideas into practice and helped refine them, has made the MiniMill possible.

“That’s the interesting thing with inventors,” she says. “You have to get them to give you a few ideas, and then you need plodders, as it were, who put them through their paces in a methodical way. That’s what we’ve done. The original ideas have developed. There were some tough times when we thought we couldn’t get the economics right – then we made some changes and that was just the thing.”

The company’s early work was stop-start – grants came in, a new phase would be completed, and the grant would run out. Having finally proven the concept in the lab, it set out to secure larger-scale funding to scale up to industrial size – and that’s when disaster struck. The company won a match-funded grant under the DTI’s Technology Programme to build its industrial prototype with a partner in Manchester, only for the match-fund investor to pull out of the deal at the last minute because its investment committee discovered it had already reached its quota in green technologies.

Having received some initial grounding on Intellectual Property and business planning from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta), Riddlestone approached g2i for advice on securing the match funding required for the DTI grant. The g2i team worked with her to understand the investor's perspective and to structure her business model to make it more attractive to equity investors. And with further advice on presenting her proposition to investors, putting together a sales strategy and financial planning, she continues to use some of the lessons learnt from the programme today. “I’d already amassed a certain amount of knowledge, but where I benefited from the g2i programme was on the sales side – how you present the figures to a potential investor and what they’re looking for. That was very helpful.”

Putting the g2i advice into practice, Riddlestone got into discussions with a business angel who subsequently invested the £400,000 the company needed

Putting the g2i advice into practice, Riddlestone got into discussions with a business angel who subsequently invested the £400,000 the company needed, together with a small amount from the board. “Our business angel backer has worked in technology companies himself and he liked the idea. All that work on the business plan, the financial forecasts and shoring up the patents has helped with the commercialisation of the company and made us a good proposition.”

Another unexpected benefit from participating in the g2i programme was connecting with a network of other entrepreneurs. “It was almost like the class of October 2006. One of the others got their investment just as we were finishing the course and that was inspiring. Without that, it does feel a bit lonely when you’re plugging away at it and [investors are] pulling your ideas to pieces.”

Riddlestone says the company has had a steady stream of enquiries about its work but is reluctant to take engineers off the prototype construction to meet customers, so she’s been following up leads herself – something the g2i workshops also helped with. The focus is now on completing the construction of the industrial-scale plant before kicking off a full-blown sales effort early next year. BioRegional MiniMills will concentrate on selling its proprietary technology, providing the necessary designs and equipment and will also form strategic partnerships to help meet the large anticipated global demand. Its routes to market are threefold: cleaning up existing mills; building a new generation of smaller, more locally focused and environmentally friendly mills; and providing more efficient waste treatment for wood-pulp mills.

If it does a small percentage of what it hopes to achieve over the next few years, the company could have a significant impact on the paper industry. And while Riddlestone and her team have always been concerned about the paper industry’s percentage impact on the environment, she acknowledges that it’s the value of another kind of percentage figure – the one that interests investors – that will ultimately determine if her vision turns into reality.

Top of page