Shanks supply agreement for closed loop
Waste management firm Shanks will supply plastic bottles collected from its London operations to bottle-to-bottle recycler Closed Loop Recycling’s plant in Dagenham, east London.
Closed Loop Recycling managing director Chris Dow said the latest supply agreement was a welcome commitment by Shanks to domestic recycling, rather than exporting material abroad and marked “a great step forward”.
It follows CLR’s existing arrangement to receive bottles collected by Veolia Environmental Services, which has been in place since the plant opened in June 2008.
Dow told MRW: “We are talking about bottles collected in London and processed in its London materials recycling facilities. This means the bottles will only travel about three miles from its MRF to our facility.”
Dow said it was important to get waste management companies to commit their material to local reprocessors: “I can’t walk in to meet any investors without knowing I have a supply of bottles. We have to have the likes of Veolia and Shanks on board. This plant would not have been built without the commitment of waste companies – first Veolia and now Shanks – to guarantee supply of material.”.
He said making this shift to domestic reprocessing was not helped by factors such as Packaging Export Recovery Notes: “We are not saying ban it but we are saying stop stimulating it.”
Dow’s “low carbon” vision is to have UK facilities processing UK waste material for UK packaging: “We want to shrink the radius from which we get our bottles from. London collects 25-30,000 tonnes of bottles a year and we don’t want to see any of these bottles from inside the M25 going to export. Why export them? Why not send them here?”
Meanwhile, he confirmed CLR is due to open its second plant in Wales later this year.
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