Bright Green Plastics, which recycles over 40,000 tonnes of household and commercial waste into reusable material each year, has invested £750,000 into the development of its new plastics sorting plant, which will be fully operational by the end of July 2020.
The plastic sorting plant, installed at its Castleford site in West Yorkshire, will enable the firm to take bales of mixed plastics and 3D materials, collected from the kerbside, and sort them by polymer type, colour and even sift out metals, paper and other residual waste - keeping more plastic out of landfill, incinerators and the ocean.
The three-figure investment, which covers purchase of the plant, civil engineering and installation costs, will allow Bright Green Plastics to buy material from the wider market and eliminate reliance on purchasing pre-sorted bales from other processors.
The new Castleford sorting plant is phase one of Bright Green Plastic’s long-term investment plan, where the business is set to further upgrade the equipment to continue to keep up with the demand of recycling services in line with the introduction of the UK plastic tax in 2022.
Steve Spencer, managing director at Bright Green Plastics, said: “This investment will reduce the core costs within our business, however, we are also excited by the fact it will create more jobs in an area, whilst boosting the UK plastic reprocessing industry - which has been badly affected by COVID19, by creating more recycling capacity.”
“The new UK sorting plant is likely to discourage exporting of mixed materials due to this new UK based processing capacity to sort the plastics into single stream polymers prior to recycling.”