UK Firm Expands Plastics Recycling Facility

Operations Director Andrew Shackleton with Louise Ellman MP opening Centriforce’s new plastics recycling facility.

The Liverpool, U.K.-based plastics recycler Centriforce Products has opened a plastics recycling facility at its Liverpool, U.K., production center. The company, which says it is the largest independent plastics recycling firm in the U.K., invested £1 million (US$1.5 million) on the project.

According to Ronnie Doctor with Centriforce, the company began the project around one year ago and has installed various types of equipment, including sorters, agglomerators, shredders and conveyor lines. Doctor says the equipment will give the company the ability to handle a wider range of scrap plastics.

Doctor adds that plastics recyclers in the U.K. have been challenged with the influx of lower quality scrap plastics. The new equipment, he says, should help the company to meet its finished product demands, while handling a wider range of materials. The company takes in plastics from both industrial and municipal sources.

Louise Ellman, a member of the U.K. parliament who attended the official grand opening, said, "I'm delighted to be able to come and open this plastics recycling plant. As a private investor, Centriforce is putting its faith in the U.K.'s growing recycling industry and is making a valuable contribution towards a more robust infrastructure for UK plastics recycling in the future. Centriforce's continued investment will stop thousands of metric tons of waste from going to landfill every year and help to create green jobs for U.K. companies.”

The new facility is the culmination of the company’s £2 million (US$3.2 million) expansion at Centriforce’s operations, which has seen the company double its production capacity to more than 10,000 metric tons per year over the past four years.

Simon Carroll, Centriforce’s managing director, says, "Centriforce has taken the bold decision to develop an in-house capability for sorting mixed plastic waste feedstock. We are still only one of a few U.K. recyclers to take this course, but we believe it is important to invest in a long-term solution.

"The U.K. recycled plastics industry can play a key part in generating demand for mixed plastic waste streams from both municipal and industrial sources, thus contributing to U.K. landfill reduction targets,” Carroll adds. "To do this we need to develop an infrastructure capable of delivering a reliable supply of high quality feedstock. We decided that the only way to guarantee the high-performance products our customers expect was to invest in our own facilities."

The new recycling facility will sort pre- and post-consumer mixed plastic waste streams from a range of sources and prepare a quality feedstock for production.