Closed Loop Recycling has revealed plans to develop a second mixed plastics recycling plant in Flintshire, Wales. The company has revealed that its plastic bottle recycling capacity will rise by over 50% when the new £12m plant starts operating in October 2009.
The project is being funded with cash from the private equity firm Foresight Group, a bank loan from Allied Irish Bank, and through public sector funding from the Welsh Assembly.
Compared to the company’s first plant, which opened in London in June 2008 and turns around 35,000 tonnes of recovered plastic bottles into recycled raw material for new food and drink packaging, the Welsh plant will have an annual input volume of 55,000 tonnes – equivalent to about 1.3 billion 50cl bottles.
According to a recent study, the number of plastic bottles entering the UK waste stream is approximately 525,000 tonnes a year, which equates to an estimated 13 billion plastic bottles. The 2007 report found that some 4.5 billion bottles were being recycled, with an estimated eight billion being exported or sent to landfill sites.
Closed Loop MD, Chris Dow, says: “This plant will allow us to make a real impact to plastic recycling in north Wales and northwest England, and we’re delighted to have such positive support from the Welsh Assembly Government. This new venture is further evidence that the UK is undergoing a recycling revolution.”
The company is reportedly already working on plans for a third plant, which could be up and running by the end of 2010 and has apparently got ambitions to create up to five facilities in the UK by 2013.
Closed Loop Recycling collects two main types of plastic bottle: PET (used for soft drinks and water bottles) and HDPE (milk bottles). The PET bottles are recycled using patented technology developed by South Carolina-based United Resource Recovery Corporation to sort, granulate and super-clean the recycled plastic bottles. This produces a high-quality raw material that has been tested extensively and is widely used in food applications in the US and Europe.
Closed Loop has also developed long-term relationships with Veolia Environmental Services for the supply of plastic waste. Veolia receives the household waste plastic from local authorities, which in turn has collected it from householders via kerbside and bring banks.
Coca Cola Enterprises is supporting Closed Loop’s endeavours in Britain as part of its wider environmental commitments across Europe. CCE is striving to increase its use on average 25% recycled PET across its European operations by the end of 2010, a level already managed with operations in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
Coca-Cola Enterprises MD, Hubert Patricot, says: “Sustainable packaging is something we’re committed to. We’re delighted that Closed Loop Recycling’s plant in London will help us purchase recycled PET here in the UK. It’s encouraging to see a process that allows waste to be collected from UK consumers, reprocessed locally, with the recycled product being put back to use in our factories across the UK.”
Sir Stuart Rose, chief executive, Marks & Spencer, says: “Recycling is an important way for us all to reduce our impact on the environment, and the Closed Loop Recycling plant is a major step forward for recycling in the UK. We’ll be able to send some of our Food to Go packaging waste to the plant for recycling and use even more recycled plastic in our M&S packaging. Reducing the amount of waste from our stores and using more sustainable sources for our packaging is also one of the main aims of our new ‘eco-plan’, Plan A.”
Closed Loop, M&S, Coca-Cola and others have recently launched initiatives to collect packaging waste resulting from ‘away from home’ food and drink consumption.
A spokesperson for Closed Loop Recycling told Water Innovation: “CCE has access to around a third of the output from the company’s first plant, but we cannot comment at present about second plant commitments, as they are under negotiation.”
That said, CCE has confirmed that it has secured additional rPET capacity from Closed Loop’s second plant, along with Logoplaste and Nampak.
Until Closed Loop started operations, there was no facility to recycle plastic bottles back into plastic food packaging in Britain. It could be argued that now that the company has opened its facility, the industry is beginning to view recycled plastic in a new light.
“Plastic bottles are no longer waste – they’re becoming a valuable resource,” says Chris Dow. “In addition, each plastic bottle we recycle reduces that bottle’s carbon footprint by around 25%.”
AWS Ecoplastics and Jayplas in the UK are also thought to be planning to produce food-grade rPET in the UK, but not via URRC. At any rate, Closed Loop doesn’t see other plants as competition. “Demand far oustrips available supply for food-grade rPET,” said a company spokesperson. “Our major competitor is virgin PET, so the pricing of virgin resin is what we have to compete with.”
Beyond the UK, the plastic recycling business is also growing in importance around the world. In many ways, Britain is late to the party, with the first recycling facility having been opened in Mexico in 2005 and several plants already producing food-grade rPET using the same process as Closed Loop Recycling based in the US, Mexico, Phiippines, Austria, Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden.
The Coca-Cola System has invested in recycling plants using the URRC process in at least 17 countries. There are plants using different processes to produce food-grade rPET in France, Italy and Spain among other countries.
However, the world’s largest food-grade plastic bottle to bottle recycling plant is the $60m Coca-Cola facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The company teamed up with URRC to build the plant and it will produce enough rPET to make the equivalent of nearly two billion 20oz Coca-Cola bottles.
With retailers and brand owners coming under increasing pressure to satisfy consumer wishes to have more packaging made from recycled raw materials, and the number of markets implementing successful bottled deposit programmes on the rise, the future for packaging waste recycling appears to be bright.
Despite the inevitable volatility in oil prices, it’s reasonable to assume that plastic recycling plants will flourish in the foreseeable future and the competitive edge rests with those able to produce clean, cost-efficient, recycled raw material, and those that have already built a reputation in the specific market segment.
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