UK plastic recycling rates are close to 50% for both PET drinks and HDPE milk bottles, but further investment is needed in technology and equipment to extract a wider range of materials from mixed plastic waste collections.

This is the view of Keith Freegard, director of resource and recovery specialist Axion Consulting (Bramhall / UK; www.axionconsulting.co.uk), who believes increasing UK plastic recycling tonnages will be a key focus for 2012. “To get even higher bottle recycling rates, UK Plc [the UK economy] has to find viable technologies to deal with mixed rigid plastics, films and the inevitable residuals,” Freegard asserts. “Kerbside collection data points to a huge, untapped source of rigid, non-bottle packaging items becoming available as local authorities offer collections of more household plastics.”

The UK’s first fully integrated sorting and recycling facility for mixed plastic packaging was opened last year - see Plasteurope.com of 25.03.2011 - and Freegard points out that, while full mixed plastics collections are popular with local authorities, they can only be initiated realistically when a processing infrastructure is in place. Otherwise, he says, recovery of the materials that are currently targeted will actually decrease.

Greater emphasis on the recycling of post-consumer plastic packaging and films is also required, especially as this could lead to a more coordinated approach in overcoming the challenges presented by the more-difficult-to-recycle waste streams. To achieve this, there must be investment in a next-generation infrastructure as today’s primary sorting Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) and bottle-sorting Plastic Recovery Facilities (PRFs) were developed in response to the demand for reprocessing of PET and HDPE bottles.

“People are realising we need to tackle more difficult waste streams,“ Freegard explains. “One solution would be to build more integrated ‘resource parks’ where varied and mixed waste streams can be processed in complementary ways.”

An additional advantage of such a facility is that, in addition to being able to recycle more plastics, the residual materials from sorting commingled waste streams can be used as an energy source to provide local heat and power for adjacent washing and reprocessing units. However, warns the Axion director, such novel ways of dealing with plastic and other waste streams would require fundamental changes to how MRFs assess and handle their in-feed and output waste streams.

Therefore, in summary, Freegard says 2012 will see increasing importance placed on MRF optimisation, including the use of sophisticated modelling, sampling and analysis services. He adds: “Accurate and representative measurement of inputs and outputs is vital to highlight where plant control responses are needed to optimise operational efficiency, maximise profits and ultimately recover the valuable resources that would otherwise be discarded.”