Enval Ltd. Receives Financial Assistance to Grow Business

The British company Enval Ltd. ha announced that it has obtained backing from a number of investors to scale up applications of its waste processing technology, which it says extracts commercially usable aluminum, oil and gas from laminated packaging waste, such as drink cartons and toothpaste tubes, allowing the waste to be completely recycled in an economically viable way. The company received the financing was announced November 8th 2006.

Following results from Enval’s demonstration unit, Tetra Pak and several other companies and government agencies have already expressed their interest and wish to support the development of the technology to gain early access to its industrial applications. As well as laminated packaging, Enval also plans in the future to develop solutions for many other types of wastes.

“We are delighted to support a very promising technology that if successful on a large scale will substantially increase recycling in the U.K.," says Richard Hands, environment manager for Tetra Pak UK & Ireland.

Formed in 2005, Enval was initially a project developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge

Carlos Ludlow-Palafox, co-founder and CTO of Enval, says, “The opportunity for Enval is immense. Drink cartons collection and partial recycling has been increasing at a rate of 12 percent per year since 1992, but there is tremendous room for growth if we can recover value from the residue of the paper recycling process, in a manner that is not only environmentally friendly but that also brings large economical advantages. We are confident that Enval's success will result in many more metric tons of drink cartons being collected for recycling and that is why we are expanding our network of industry partners. We will capture the value in what business and households currently discard.”

The investors are led by CREATE Partners, which was formed when Enval won the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs Business Plan Competition. The syndicate has made an initial seed investment of £200,000 with a view to invest further amounts over the next three years. Enval says this investment will allow it to build a first-class execution team, to develop a pilot plant for industrial demonstration over the next six to nine months and to secure initial contracts with industry partners around the world.