Richard Graham Zero Carbon Tour Interview with Planet Mark

Hello, my name is Richard Graham, I work for James Cropper PLC we're based in the lovely village of Burneside in the South Lakeland area.

We are essentially three businesses on this site; we are a technical fibre producer, we produce paper and the newest business on site is Colourform which produce three-dimensional paper which is essentially designed and manufactured as a plastic replacement.

In order to conduct business we traditionally have been a large user of fossil fuels, and paper is categorised in the same way as and scale as steel making, petrochemicals and glass making.

We are a large user, or we have traditionally been a large user, of fossil fuels. In our case that fossil fuel is gas. In recent years we have realised that this is an unsustainable position and we need to take steps to first of all reduce but ultimately eliminate the use of fossil fuels on site.

We have a plan which we are slowly working our way through which involves the use of, for our electrical demand, the use of renewable sources such as solar pv and hydroelectric and ultimately wind potentially. On the other side of the business, the heat side, which is very important for paper making we have plans to use some modern technology that will allow us to recover a lot of the heat that we have in our process that currently goes out of the roof.

On the emissions side the company on average generate in throughout the year, traditionally have generated around 22 000 tons of CO2 each year. It's a big business and our aim is to reduce that to net zero in ten years. It's a very tough target.

The way we are going to approach that is to look at the electrical side, this is one issue, which we are on that journey now by using renewable sources, and on the heat side we're going to use heat recovery systems to reuse the heat that we inject into the process, and that heat will be generated using hopefully green hydrogen and electricity.