A HAMPSHIRE expert says transporting the county’s waste paper to China could be more environmentally friendly than driving it by van to other parts of the UK.

Professor Stephen Turnock, from the University of Southampton, says sending waste on the 11,000-mile sea journey is no worse than sending them elsewhere in the South – and may be better.

It comes after the Daily Echo reported yesterday that 67 per cent of the waste collected in Hampshire between April and June this year was paper and cardboard sent to be processed in China.

UKIP’s leader in Hampshire, Alan Stone, described it as a “farce” that waste is being sent by container ships from Southampton to Guandong Province.

He has pointed out that as well as the environmental impact of a long container journey there will also be the heavy goods trips getting the waste to and from the port.

Bosses at Hampshire County Council and waste disposal giant Veolia, which co-ordinates the Project Integra arrangement to dispose of waste from all of the county, say upheavals in the UK paper market and the closure of some mills have caused them to look overseas.

They say that there is no overall cost to the councils, which share revenue from selling the waste material to Chinese mills.

A spokesman for the firm said that the waste goes to China on ships that have recently arrived in the UK with imports from the Far East.

Prof Turnock, pictured below, an expert in maritime fluid dynamics at the university, said that when comparing one long journey on a container ship to dozens of smaller trips in vans or lorries the environmental impact would be the same or less.

Daily Echo:

He said: “Transportation of goods by ship is pretty environmentally friendly. If you are putting everything together on a large vessel then it becomes a very efficient way of transporting goods.

"You would use about the same energy in driving something about 100km in a van compared to bringing the same thing from China in a container ship.

“Ideally you want to use vans for as short a component of a journey as possible as they are probably the least environmentally friendly way of transporting things.

“Driving in a van would be disproportionately bad for the amount of goods you could actually transport.

“Obviously you would have to look at how many vans it took to drive goods from recycling centres to the port, and then in China, but transporting by ship is an efficient way of doing it.

“You have to send the ship back to China when it has imported goods here, but is it better to send them back empty or full? At least there’s the economic benefit."

“Likewise you need to send recycled goods to where they will be used – if there is more of a use in manufacturing in China than in uk it would be better to send it there.”