Brussels, 29/07/2003 (Agence Europe) - Last week, the European Commission approved EUR 24 million (£17 million) in aid for Shotton, a newsprint producer owned by UPM-Kymmene and located in North Wales. The aid will be granted under the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), which was established to promote sustainable waste management. The aid is intended to adapt Shotton's facilities to produce newsprint from waste paper rather than virgin pulp. In notifying the planned aid to the Commission, the UK claimed that Shotton, owned by UPM-Kymmene, would be eligible for aid amounting to € 35 million on the basis of the environmental aid guidelines. In the Commission's assessment the project does not qualify as an environmental project within the meaning of the environmental aid guidelines which only provide for aid to be granted to investments that improve a company's individual environmental record. In this case, the aid encourages Shotton to take up waste paper that may originate from products sold by any paper producer and that aid would help the UK to improve its own environmental record in general and to help the UK to achieve its general obligations under the EC Landfill and Packaging directives. However, the environmental aid guidelines do allow aid to be awarded for the building of a new sludge combustor to burn 200,000 tonnes of de-inking sludge per year and EUR 13 million can be granted on this basis and a further EUR 11 million under the Multisectoral Framework for large investment projects. The project is expected to create a relatively high number of indirect jobs in the region. The total cost of the necessary adaptations is EUR 175 million and the new machinery will have a processing capacity of approximately 321,000 tonnes of waste paper per year.