About Us

Ecco Newsprint was formed in 2004 to build a new British recycled newsprint paper mill in the Tees Valley in North East England. It will produce over 400,000 tonnes of newsprint per annum using recovered waste materials as raw material.

The mill will result in over half a million tonnes of recovered waste paper being diverted from landfill per year. Ecco was founded by Chairman Ramsay Hampton, who has 20 years’ experience in the UK newsprint industry.

Ecco’s mill is also a response to increasing environmental awareness. The UK has historically achieved a low level of recycling of household waste, with most being sent to landfill, but this is now changing with the advent of EU and UK Government pressure on local authorities reflected in initiatives such as landfill tax. Ecco’s mill will offer a sustainable, environmentally sensitive, and importantly local means of recycling newspapers and magazines collected in the north of England and Scotland, as a replacement for landfill.

The world scale state-of-the-art recycling mill will provide top quality newsprint to major newspaper groups and publishers, who have made long term commitments to purchase, based on their confidence in and long standing relationships with Ecco’s management team. Ecco's business will incorporate the following features:

  • Metso fibre preparation plant and high speed paper machine, producing top quality newsprint
  • Raw material - 100% recycled fibre: old newspapers (ONP) and magazines (OMG)
  • Production of high quality standard newsprint and improved newsprint
Ecco will sell high quality standard newsprint, which will have end-use in newspapers, leaflets and inserts. With the large publisher base in UK most of the production will be supplied to local customers, who have said they welcome this new local player producing good quality newsprint at competitive cost.