UK – Plastic recycler Viridor, owned by U.S. investment company KKR, has shut down its polymer recycling facility in Skelmersdale, a town in the north of England.
The center ceased operations in January 2023, but the move has only now been disclosed with the publishing of the company’s financial report for 2022/2023.
The report states: “Following an extensive business review and increasing performance at the Avonmouth polymers facility, we ceased operation at our Skelmersdale polymers facility during the year.”
Viridor opened the Avonmouth resource recovery center in March 2022, a facility co-locating plastic reprocessing and energy recovery through waste incineration.
The recycling facility has a capacity of over 80,000 tonnes a year and it uses 70 GWh to 105 GWh a year of energy recovered.
The company said in its 2022/2023 financial report that the decision ‘is aligned to Viridor’s ambitious polymers strategy and commitment to being a fully circular plastics recycling and reprocessing business by 2025’.
It further stated that the discontinued operations had no impact on the total loss for the year, the consolidated statement of comprehensive income, the consolidated statement of financial position, or the consolidated statement of changes in equity.
“This is a presentational change only with the impact being reclassifications of line items in the consolidated income statement and cash generated from operations in the consolidated statement of cash flows,” the company noted.
The move comes after Viridor posted a £13 million (US$16.49m) loss for its plastic recycling subsidiary, Viridor Polymers, in its 2021/2022 financial statement.
However, the company had an overall profit of £167.2 million (US$212.07m) in the financial year 2022/2023, having recycled over 86,000 tonnes of plastic in 2023, and over 85,000 tonnes in 2022.
Viridor took ownership of the 40,000 tonnes per year Skelmersdale facility when it acquired Intercontinental Recycling Ltd for £8.1 million (US$10.27m) in 2009.
The facility took material from commercial and local authority sources per year, producing plastic pellets and flakes ready for use in remanufacture.
The site specializes in processing high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles.
MBA Polymers to open plastics recycling site in Wimblington
Meanwhile, MBA Polymers UK has announced plans to open a plastics recycling site in Wimblington, Cambridgeshire, at a site previously owned by Plasgran, part of the Berry group.
Plasgran opened a new site in Warwickshire earlier this year and in May 2023, the company announced that it is considering consolidating the Wimblington site which has a capacity of 50,000 tonnes per year.
The facility was hit by a fire in July 2022 which Plasgran’s accounts for 2022, published in June, say caused a “significant impact as several production machines were damaged beyond repair the production capacity of the facility was reduced for some time.”
The new facility marks MBA Polymers UK’s fourth location in the UK, joining its original Worksop site in Nottinghamshire, a separation line in Dover acquired in 2019, and the Duddeston site in West Midlands, established in 2022.
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