A ‘pioneering’ new recycling facility which will reprocess hard-to-recycle plastics has opened in Fife.
The facility is co-owned by Morrisons, with recycling plant specialists, Yes Recycling, operating it on behalf of the supermarket chain. Organisations such as Nestlé and Zero Waste Scotland helped develop plans for the site.
Morrisons said the facility will help develop a greater plastics recycling infrastructure in the UK, with it keeping material in a closed loop and saving it from being exported overseas.
It uses patented technology which was developed over a seven-year period, which will turn hard-to-recycle flexible food packaging into plastic flakes and pellets, as well as new Ecosheet – which is used in the construction and agriculture sectors.
At full capacity, the site will recycle 15,000 tonnes of post-consumer plastic packaging a year. The hard-to-recycle soft plastic – such as chocolate wrappers, crisp packets, and food film – will be sent to the facility from Morrisons distribution sites and stores, and by Cireco Scotland who operate Fife Council’s household kerbside collection service and who also separate out the plastics ready for recycling.
Fife is currently one of a limited number of local councils who collect and segregate hard-to-recycle plastic from its customer collections and send it to a recycling facility.
Morrisons said that, unlike ‘high grade’ plastics – which are more valuable and which have been harvested for many years – this ‘low grade’ soft plastic has not been recycled widely due to limitations of technology to recycle this material into commercially viable products. So it has typically been incinerated, ended up in landfill, or even been exported overseas – often to countries whose infrastructure cannot accommodate it.
It added that the new site is a ‘major’ step forward for the British recycling industry, with it creating around 60 new jobs. The UK 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 targets, Morrisons revealed.
Omer Kutluoglu, co-owner of Yes Recycling, said, “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.”
Jamie Winter, procurement director at Morrisons, added, “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.”
David Gunn, Zero Waste Scotland’s recycling improvement fund manager, commented, “Zero Waste Scotland has been supporting local authorities through the Recycling Improvement Fund, which helps councils to enhance and invest in their recycling and reuse services.
“It’s great to see Fife Council using this support to enable householders to recycle soft plastic by upgrading CIRECO’s material recycling facility. This will significantly enhance the local authority’s ability to deal with ‘hard-to-recycle’ plastics that would otherwise be exported overseas.
“Instead, the separated soft plastics are now supplied to Yes Recycling for processing into Ecosheet, transforming what would have been waste into a highly useful and sustainable product – a fantastic example of a circular economy at work.”
Sokhna Gueye, head of packaging at Nestlé UK & Ireland, said, “It is really exciting to see Yes Recycling open its doors in Fife. We made a pre-investment of £1.65million into the facility as at Nestlé we are working hard towards our vision that none of our packaging, including plastics, ends up in landfill or as litter. So, it is fantastic to see our packaging such as KitKat wrappers or Purina pouches given a second life, thus contributing to building a circular economy for plastics.”
