Step change for UK polymer recycling

London - The UK plastics industry is making some significant strides towards meeting an ambitious goal of preventing waste plastics being dumped into landfill by 2020 – as highlighted by a series of advanced new facilities now coming on stream.

Among the highest profile projects, is a £15-million facility just opened by Coca-Cola Enterprises Ltd (CCE) and ECO Plastics. The plant is expected to more than double the amount of bottle-grade recycled plastic (rPET) previously created in UK, and will allow CCE to use 25% rPET in all its bottles by the end of 2012.

The unit is being operated by Continuum Recycling, a joint venture between CCE and ECO Plastics, is intended to bring the recycling process full-circle: sorting and reprocessing used plastic packaging to return the material to UK shelves as part of another bottle.

The Continuum Recycling factory is located at ECO Plastics’ existing site in Lincolnshire, which, with the additional capacity, becomes the world’s largest plastics reprocessing facility.

Continuum Recycling will be used this summer by Coca-Cola as part of an initiative to collect Coke and additional PET soft drinks bottles and turn them back into new bottles on the shelves within six weeks.

“Our investment in Continuum Recycling shows that we are serious about setting the industry standard for sustainable packaging,” said Simon Baldry, managing director of CCE.

And, after a 15-year planning battle Cory Environmental has finally opened its new Riverside Resource Recovery (RRR) energy-from-waste (EfW) facility at Belvedere in Bexley. The facility will process London’s waste to help the capital meet its landfill diversion and renewable energy targets.

The RRR facility will process an average of 585,000 tonnes of non-recyclable residual waste each year, generating 66MW of renewable electricity for export to the National Grid.

RRR is currently the largest EfW facility in the UK, and, claims Cory Environmental, one of the most efficient. The plant is about to start its availability trials which are the final phase of commissioning and it is already exporting electricity to the National Grid.

RRR incorporates a 270m long deep-water jetty, which enables the majority of waste to be delivered by river, removing more than 100,000 lorry movements from the capital’s congested roads each year.

RRR produces around 170,000 tonnes of incinerator bottom ash each year. This ash is the principal residue from the incineration process, and is transported by river to Tilbury in Essex where it is used to make aggregate for the construction sector. It is already being used on the M25 widening scheme.

Adopting a different approach to process waste, Cynar plc has awarded Rockwell Automation an $11-million contract to design and build a plastics-to-fuel conversion plant in Bristol, UK for SITA UK ltd - a Cynar customer and partner in the development. The facility is due to start up by the end of 2012.

The contract includes the design and build of process skids, automation architecture, software, power control and engineering/startup services. The integrated set-up will employ Rockwell’s PlantPAx process automation system.

Foster Wheeler provided basic process engineering design services for the 6,000 tonnes per annum plant. It is to convert non-recyclable end-of-life plastics into liquid fuels, primarily diesel.

The engineering firm had previously worked with Cynar to improve the quality of the fuel produced at a demonstration plant in Portlaoise, Ireland.

Rockwell has worked with Cynar over the past two years developing the engineering, modularisation and process improvements of its conversion plant. The process is now claimed to be highly efficient: each plant producing up to 19,000 litres of fuel from 20 tonnes of plastics.

Within Cynar’s system polymer material is continuously treated in a cylindrical chamber and pyrolised at 370-420ºC. Pyrolytic gases are condensed to yield a hydrocarbon distillate comprising straight and branched chain aliphatics, cyclic aliphatics and aromatic hydrocarbons.

The syngas goes through a scrubber and then back into the furnaces to heat the pyrolysis chambers.

Accurate control is critical to the efficiency of the process, especially at the pyrolysis stage where plastic must be heated uniformly and rapidly. If temperature gradients develop in the molten plastic mass then different degrees of cracking will occur and products with a wide distribution of chain lengths will be formed.

Cynar plans to establish up to 30 plants across the UK and Ireland to recover synthetic fuel from a variety of sources.