With so much news of a rather downbeat nature at present, I must just put on record a huge 'rah to UPM for providing a much-needed feelgood factor to the start of the year.

News that the forestry and papermaking giant - or should I say Biofore giant - is to invest a further £17m at its Shotton Plant in North Wales comes as a tremendous boost, especially when set against a backdrop of so many recent UK mill closures.

A quick back of an envelope calculation reveals that UPM has invested upward of £135m at its Shotton and Caledonian mills over the past six years, creating something like 300 jobs in the process, including 160 new positions that will be created at Shotton. In addition to that are the hundreds of contractors who've been busy building renewable energy plants among the major projects involved.

The latest Shotton investment is significant because the MRF (materials recovery facility, or "murf") will be handling co-mingled mixed waste as opposed to solely the paper that Shotton recycles into newsprint. While this co-mingling of waste may be something that is peculiar to the way UK local authorities organise their collections, and therefore not necessarily of relevance to UPM's other facilities worldwide, this expansion into other forms of materials recovery is still noteworthy nonetheless. And it's great to have some good news.