SCOTLAND – Morrisons supermarket and Yes Recycling have opened what they claim to be a ‘first of its kind’ soft plastic recycling plant in Fife, Scotland.
The development of the recycling facility also attracted a number of organizations such as Zero Waste Scotland and Nestlé UK & Ireland.
Morrisons says the site can process a mix of plastics, including film, into reusable materials. It aims to develop a greater plastics recycling infrastructure in the UK to keep the material in a closed loop and prevent it from being exported overseas.
Jamie Winter, Procurement Director at Morrisons said: “We’ve done a significant amount of work to reduce our plastic use and now we want to help build a UK infrastructure to recycle the plastic that we may still need to use. By recycling these problematic plastics here in the UK we can give them a new life.”
The supermarket claims that the facility can recycle 15,000 tonnes of post-consumer plastic packaging annually at full capacity.
Morrisons adds that the new recycling plant uses patented technology, developed over the last seven years.
It will turn hard-to-recycle flexible food packaging into plastic flakes, pellets and new Ecosheet, an environmentally friendly alternative to plywood.
The hard-to-recycle soft plastic – including chocolate wrappers, crisp packets and food film – will be sent to the site from Morrisons distribution sites and stores by Cireco Scotland which operates Fife Council’s household kerbside collection service and who also separates the plastics ready for recycling.
Fife is currently one of a limited number of local councils that collect and segregate hard-to-recycle plastic from its customer collections and send it to a recycling facility, Morrisons says.
Additionally, the new site is a major step forward for the British recycling industry – as governments around the world push for a ‘green industrial revolution’. The facility will create around 60 new jobs.
The Government has mandated that by 2027, soft plastic film and flexibles need to be collected from all households through kerbside recycling collections, by all councils in the UK.
On current projections, the UK would need one million tonnes of plastic packaging recycling capacity by then to hit these government targets.
Omer Kutluoglu, Co-owner of Yes Recycling concluded: “The UK is in desperate need of more plastic recycling capacity and, in particular, for the so-called ‘hard-to-recycle’ plastic waste such as flexible food packaging.
“Our new ‘next-generation’ recycling plant, which we’ve developed over the last seven years, is designed to tackle exactly these materials.
“It is a blueprint for the future and will help to kick-start the UK’s plastics recycling industry. It will mean we can keep plastic in our own country’s ‘circular economy’ and out of our seas and oceans.”
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