Plastics & Rubber World - July/August 2019 - 4

COMMENT

EDITORIAL
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Recycling promise approaches fulﬁlment

n January, PRW reported that Recycling Technologies had recently celebrated the opening of its new head oﬃce and factory facility in Swindon, Wiltshire.

The factory would be used to assemble the RT7000 chemical recycling machines, but
company boss Adrian Griﬃths took the opportunity to outline future plans that would
prove out the chemical recycling technology.
The ﬁrst step of this journey would involve construction of a new recycling plant in Perthshire, Scotland, which would see an RT7000 enter commercial operation for the ﬁrst time.
After the launch event, Recycling Technologies went a little quiet on the public relations
front. But a random press release dropping into the PRW editorial inbox brought the story
back to life.
As Griﬃths had promised, the so-called 'Project Beacon' is now underway. Located at the
Binn Eco Park in Abernethy, Perthshire, and supported by a £1.7m funding award from
the Circular Economy Investment Fund (backed by the Scottish government and European
Regional Development Funding), a new recycling concept is now taking shape.
The site combines a Recycling Technologies' RT7000 with
a mechanical recycler from Pi Polymer Recycling. This will
create what's described as the ﬁrst Advanced Plastics
Reprocessing facility.
Essentially, the goal is to draw greater quantities of plastic waste away from landﬁll and incinerators and into the
circular economy by locating complementary processing
streams at the same facility.

The driving force is consumer confusion. Such is the
wide array of plastics now ﬂooding the retail market that
people are not sure which plastics can or cannot be recycled, or how they should be sorted. With this setup,
problems related to curbside sorting are virtually eliminated as, between the two streams,
almost any plastic can be processed.
In practise, any plastic material which cannot be chipped and reprocessed will advance
to the chemical recycler for conversion into Plaxx oil. Produced using a cracking process,
premium grades of this product can be used to manufacture virgin plastic material.
The latest schedule update has machinery being delivered to the site over late 2019 and
early 2020. This will be followed by trials over Q1, while processing of commercial quantities of plastic waste should start in Q2. Creating about 70 new jobs, the plant will be able
to process up to 25,000 tonnes of plastic per year.
With the plant capable of processing up to 90% of all collected plastic, it has the potential
to become an integral part of plastic waste recycling network in the UK. Factor that out
and the country could end up in the same boat as Sweden, where the national recycling
network is so eﬃcient the country is now a net importer of waste material.
As always, thanks for reading.
Julian Buckley
Editor, PRW magazine and website, jbuckley@crain.com

WWW.PRW.COM | JULY/AUGUST 2019

A new recycling
concept is now
taking shape

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Plastics & Rubber World - July/August 2019

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