Viridor makes plastics recycling a UK business
ARECYCLING company which has its headquarters in Taunton has announced that all of its recyclable plastic waste will be reprocessed in the UK from next year.
It’s part of Viridor’s recycling investment programme which has commissioned its new £65m plastics reprocessing plant at Avonmouth, near Bristol, for 2020.
It will be the UK’s biggest multipolymer facility which will create new raw materials, ready to be reused by packaging manufacturers in flake and pellet form from all its core recyclable materials collected in the UK.
Viridor managing director Phil Piddington (pictured, right with Pennon Group director of corporate affairs, Sarah Heald) said that, crucially, this demonstrated that plastic need not be considered a single use item, with reprocessing allowing it to be put back into the economy in a process which uses 50 per cent less energy than virgin plastic.
Sustainability charity WRAP identifies these core plastics as HDPE (plastic bottles, including milk bottles, shampoo bottles and other household items, such as cleaning
products), PET (fizzy drink and water bottles) and PP (pots, tubs and trays).
The UK Plastics Pact, of which Viridor was a founding member, has made the removal of unrecyclable plastics a key focus over the coming year. It says that as far as possible, by the end of this year, Pact members should remove polystyrene and PVC from food packaging and, by the end of 2020, they should be eradicated from non-food products.
Mr Piddington, who is also Chairman of the trade body the Environmental Services Association, said: “Viridor has been using the Recycling Index to track public attitudes to recycling for four years and, as a UK company working with 150 local authority and major corporate clients and 32,000 customers, we understand the appetite for greater resource efficiency and a more circular economy.
“What this really means is that people expect the UK to be responsible for the waste it produces. The public want us to find a way to recycle and reprocess plastic so it is no longer considered single use, that it will go on to live another life and make an ongoing contribution to our economy.
“Viridor, through the Plastics Pact, is working hard with like-minded companies who can help us achieve our goal of making it easy for people to do the right thing when they separate their recycling at home.
“We are accomplishing this through our dedicated division, Viridor Resource Management (VRM). The public should feel confident that when they put the ‘Right Stuff in the Right Bin’, we ensure that it can be recycled and reprocessed by investing in UK infrastructure.”
Sarah Heald, director of corporate affairs and investor relations at Viridor’s parent company, Pennon Group, owners of South West Water, said the investment commitment would help to address the reprocessing capacity gap which had led to plastic waste being exported.
In addition, policy changes including the 2022 plastic tax, which will require packaging to contain at least 30 per cent recyclable material, were creating the demand for recyclable material in the UK – another factor which had contributed to plastic being exported.
She said it was an exciting time to be in the recycling industry, a time when programmes, such as David Attenborough’s ‘Blue Planet’, had captured the imagination of the public with this greater awareness about recycling being developed in line with changes in government policy.
Ms Heald said: “The plastics tax and the Resources and Waste Strategy’s focus on issues such as Extended Producer Responsibility, or producer pays, will have a really significant impact because they help to create the right environment for investment in the infrastructure the UK needs and, of course, the demand for recyclable material.”