Enval has announced the opening of a new engineering site in Luton, U.K. The new site will allow the company to expand operations from its Cambridge, U.K. headquarters and continue development of its material recovery process, which allows users to extract aluminum from laminates.
Enval focuses on providing solutions across industrial, commercial and municipal sectors to deliver value from scrap materials. The company says its technology will make a significant contribution by offering a recycling route for flexible laminate packaging materials.
"Enval is looking forward to showcasing its process to potential customers," says David Boorman, Enval’s business development manager. "Enval’s new technology separates the aluminum from laminates, which means that this valuable commodity can be recycled using a process that can scale to suit the need, generate profit and make a true environmental difference.
Previous tests the company conducted over the past year have demonstrated that the process can be used to address challenges presented by laminate materials. The Enval process allows packaging systems based on these materials to be completely recycled in a sustainable and economically viable way, according to the company.
"Flexible packaging systems based on plastic/aluminum laminates are widely used because of their many positive attributes but the absence of a viable recycling process for them is a major drawback and is creating an increasing landfill problem,” says Martin Lamb, Enval’s chairman. “Now, though, thanks to Enval, a solution is at hand and the opening of Enval's engineering site in Luton is a clear demonstration of the commercial appetite that exists for the enabling technologies and services that we can offer."
"This additional facility will allow Enval to rapidly scale its operations and will be used to demonstrate the ability of the Enval pilot plant to operate continuously on significant volumes of waste," Lamb adds.