AWS Eco Plastics Opens Large Plastics Recycling Plant

Following a £14 million (US$24 million) investment program, AWS Eco Plastics has opened its UK reprocessing center – said to be Europe’s largest, with a capable of handling 2 billion plastics bottles and containers a year.

The major upgrade to the plant has quadrupled its capacity to 15 metric tons of plastics an hour (100,000 metric tons a year) and is a key step towards AWS’s goal of becoming the leading UK provider of food grade recycled plastics.

The facility is able to segregate and process a wider range of plastics which previously had been baled and sent abroad for reprocessing or to landfill sites. Most bottles are now delabelled, granulated and washed at the plant. The resulting flakes are then sent on for use in new plastics products such as packaging, fleece jackets and piping.

"Britain has lagged behind Europe in the recycling of plastics. There is currently very little recycling of mixed plastics as the capacity to reprocess has been limited. Our new plant with its considerable extra capacity can take plastics waste from local councils, supermarkets and other users and recycle it into flakes of the highest quality for use in general manufacturing and plastic bags," said Jonathon Short, AWS’s CEO.

Next year, AWS will install a new processing line which will enable it to sort and process recycled plastics to the standard required by the food industry.

AWS also has reportedly signed a contract with Artenius PET Packaging Europe. Under the contract, AWS will provide Artenius, a bottling firm, based in the United Kingdom, with a minimum of 13,000 metric tons of plastic pellet a year.

The contract is valued at around £11million a year.