
Viridor, United Kingdom, has announced that starting next year all plastic scrap it collects in that country will be reprocessed domestically. The announcement follows a recent survey by the company in which 85 percent of respondents said the U.K. should recycle its own plastic scrap rather than exporting and 64 percent said they're more likely to buy products with recyclable packaging.
After the commissioning of its new 65-million-euro plastics reprocessing plant, Avonmouth, England, in 2020, Viridor says it will create new raw materials, ready to be reused by packaging manufacturers in flake and pellet form from all its core recyclable materials collected in the U.K.
“Crucially, this demonstrated that plastic need not be considered a single-use item, with reprocessing allowing it to be put back into the economy in a process which uses 50 percent less energy than virgin plastic,” says Viridor Managing Director Phil Piddington.
The U.K. Plastics Pact, of which Viridor was a founding member, has made the removal of unrecyclable plastics a key focus over the coming year. It says that as far as possible, by the end of this year, Pact members should remove polystyrene and PVC from food packaging and, by the end of 2020, they should be eradicated from nonfood products.
Viridor says the announcement is in response to the findings of its 2019 Recycling Index, which tracks public behavior to recycling and is now in its fourth year. The statistics reveal a five-point increase in the number of people who believe the U.K. should recycle and reprocess plastic scrap domestically.
“Viridor has been using the Recycling Index to track public attitudes to recycling for four years and, as a U.K. company working with 150 local authority and major corporate clients and 32,000 customers, we understand the appetite for greater resource efficiency and a more circular economy,” says Piddington, who is also chairman of the Environmental Services Association. “What this really means is that people expect the U.K. to be responsible for the waste it produces. The public wants us to find a way to recycle and reprocess plastic so it is no longer considered single-use, that it will go on to live another life and make an ongoing contribution to our economy.”
Sarah Heald, director of corporate affairs and investor relations for Pennon Group, Viridor’s parent company, says the investment commitment would help to address the reprocessing capacity gap, which had led to plastic scrap being exported. She adds policy changes, including the 2022 plastic tax, which will require packaging to contain at least 30 percent recyclable material, are creating the demand for recyclable material in the U.K., another factor which had contributed to plastic being exported.
For more statistics from the 2019 Viridor Recycling Index, click here.
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