At the end of May, Defra will publish its new Waste Strategy. It aims to offer a clearer, longer-term vision for waste and resource management. This will have a direct impact on plastics recycling and will set new targets for a reduction in the proportion of commercial and industrial waste going to landfill. While the targets for recovery of waste are likely to stay at the same level, higher targets will be set for recycling and composting.

Technology is playing a key part in meeting these targets and WRAP is at the forefront of two groundbreaking initiatives that will provide a dramatic boost to plastics recycling. Groundbreaking technology is being used in the first successful commercial trial of plastic milk bottles containing recycled highdensity polyethylene (HDPE) and a recycling plant is being set up to transform used plastic bottles back into food packaging. These will both have a major impact on landfill diversion and recycling.

Transforming plastic bottles

In December this year, a £12 million joint private and public sector funding agreement will signal the opening of the first plant in the UK to recycle plastic bottles into material for food packaging. The plant, located in Dagenham and operated by Closed Loop London (CLL), will transform the recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in the UK. This will turn millions of water, soft drinks and cosmetics bottles back into new food packaging each year. It will also prevent 35,000 tonnes of packaging from being exported or sent to landfill.

Marks & Spencer (M&S) is the first major retailer to commit to sending plastic waste from its London stores to the CLL plant for recycling. The retailer will also encourage its suppliers to source recycled PET from the plant to make M&S packaging.

Initiated by CLL, the project has received private equity funding from Foresight Venture Partners and a banking facility from Allied Irish Bank (GB). It is also being supported by public sector funding from the London Development Agency (LDA) and WRAP.

The plant will use patented technology developed by South Carolina-based United Resource Recovery Corporation (URRC) to sort, flake and super-clean the recycled plastic bottles to produce a high-quality raw material that has been tested extensively and is widely used in food applications in both the USA and Europe. The average cost of reprocessing plastic waste into food grade quality recycled plastic is £400-£600 per tonne.

The facility will take in mixed PET and HDPE plastic bottles, the majority of which will come from local authority collections. They will then be sorted into separate streams. HDPE milk and juice bottles will be separated and baled for sale to other UK recyclers, while PET bottles will be subjected to further automatic sorting, including optical sorting machines, distinguishing coloured bottles from clear.

Normally, the flakes would undergo a high vacuum extrusion process to remove volatile contaminants. With the URRC process, the material is subjected to super-cleaning processes to make cost efficient food-grade flake suitable for direct blending with virgin PET resins. The technology works by heating the flakes with caustic soda in a rotating kiln, which removes the outer layers of the PET flake as well as residual labelling, surface matter and penetrated residual ‘flavours’. More than 90 per cent of the PET is retained. The resulting food-grade flake can either be sold directly as flake or extruded into pellets.

The equipment can produce a raw material from post-consumer PET packaging with 75 per cent yield efficiency, and material that does not meet food-grade conditions is designated for use in less demanding applications.

The first of its kind in the UK, this process is currently being used at eight other plants around the world, including Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Sweden, the USA and Mexico. According to Chris Dow, Managing Director of CLL: “The development of this facility is the realisation of a three-year vision to close the loop on plastics recycling in the UK. We are delighted to be able to provide food-packaging manufacturers with a commercially viable and environmentally responsible option when specifying packaging. The UK will have a world-class facility for processing its plastic waste and need not export this material for reprocessing into low grade applications.”

There will be a major growth in PET capacity, with 50,000 tonnes predicted in the next three years. The project is a considerable investment in food grade PET capacity in the UK and is a good example of what can be achieved with the right resources.

Environmentally friendly, recycled HDPE milk bottles

Similarly, a world-first technology has also been developed and used in the first commercial trial of plastic milk bottles containing 30 per cent recycled HDPE. This involved the production of 60,000 recycled content milk bottles for commercial sale from consumer scrap bottles and is the culmination of a three-year project building on early research by Linwood Foods. Initiated and funded by WRAP to develop a recycling process capable of producing food grade polythene from milk bottles, the project was delivered by an international team including Nampak Plastics, Dairy Crest, the Fraunhofer Institute, Sorema, Erema and Nextek. The team also cooperated closely with the Food Standards Agency (FSA). With some 130,000 tonnes of plastic milk bottles in use, this technology could significantly improve the future of plastics recycling in the UK.

Once collected, the post-consumer bottles are sorted by infrared. A key finding of the project was the ability for these detectors to distinguish between milk bottle grade HDPE and other HDPE bottle grades. The sorted bottles are flaked and washed in a two per cent caustic solution at 93°C to remove all surface dirt, paper labels and adhesive. The flakes are then dried and colour sorted before they are put through the ‘super-clean’ Vacurema recycling process where they are held at an elevated temperature under vacuum to remove volatile contaminants before extrusion into pellets. The new food-grade polymer is then added to virgin HDPE at 30 per cent and made back into polythene milk bottles.

Following extensive testing to ensure compliance with food packaging legislation, the project team produced and filled over 60,000 four-pint plastic milk bottles containing 30 per cent recycled content which went on sale in M&S stores in December last year as a trial. No consumer reaction on packaging quality was received, demonstrating that the recycled content bottles were indistinguishable from their virgin counterparts.

WRAP is now negotiating contracts to provide financial support to potential recyclers to get the process commercially established here in the UK.

This large-scale trial proves beyond doubt that milk bottles containing recycled material from this process are every bit as good as 100 per cent virgin bottles. They meet all the necessary criteria, both in terms of safety, production, filling and transportation, and, critically, consumer acceptance.

About 15 per cent (67,000 tonnes) of plastic bottles were collected during 2005 and collection is still growing. If the entire dairy industry adopted the 30 per cent recyclate content in milk bottles, 39,000 tonnes of waste could be saved. This is significant in light of the fact that at least 1.5 tonnes of CO2 is saved for every tonne of plastic bottles recycled.

These two projects are just some of the advances taking place in PET and HDPE packaging technology, and the UK is in the midst of a very exciting period for plastics recycling. With exploding rates of collection and unprecedented investment, the UK is transforming its position as laggard to leading the way with a number of world firsts. Recycling technology is now keeping pace with packaging innovation. Major inroads can now be made towards achieving recycling targets by highlighting the commercial opportunities that can be achieved, while satisfying consumer demand for environmentally friendly products.