Metals recycling company Sims Metal Management has today (August 4) announced the purchase of the WEEE recycling assets of logistics firm Wincanton for £17.5 million, in a move that gives it an estimated 175,000 tonnes a year of additional reprocessing capacity for waste electrical and electronic equipment.
The acquisition includes Wincanton's £4 million WEEE reprocessing plant at Billingham on Teesside, which opened in 2006 and has a capacity of 75,000 tonnes-a-year (see letsrecycle.com story), and the firm's facility at Daventry in Northamptonshire, which opened in 2009 at a cost of £5 million and has the capacity to treat around 100,000 tonnes of WEEE a year (see letsrecycle.com story).
Sims also runs a cathode ray tube (CRT) recycling facility in Ellesmere Port in Cheshire, a 32,000 tonne-a-year capacity WEEE plant at Stalybridge in Greater Manchester and a 10,000 tonne-a-year capacity ICT asset recovery plant at Dumfries.
Wincanton said that all 145 of the staff involved in its WEEE operations would transfer to Sims, following consultation.
Commenting on the deal, Graham Davy, global chief executive for Sims Metal Management's subsidiary Sims Recycling Solutions, said it would allow Sims to offer a “more localised service” to its growing customer base.
“The retailer led capability and logistics expertise of Wincanton's recycling division, together with its infrastructure, ideally complement our business model and processing expertise,” he said.
“Furthermore, the addition of a collaborative arrangement in reverse logistics with Wincanton PLC, the seller, will allow us to offer an unparalleled level of recycling excellence and service convenience to our UK customer base.”
Euan Jackson, Wincanton's managing director for recycling, commented: “The future of this business will be enhanced as part of a specialist operator in the sector with a wide range of recycling and metal processing activities that complement the Wincanton recycling operations at Daventry and Billingham.
“I would personally like to thank our employees who have helped to build the recycling operations into a growing and successful business.”
Significance
The significance of the deal was highlighted by one industry insider who today told letsrecycle.com that it could make Sims more dominant in the market, leaving just three large players in the UK market for reprocessing small WEEE and a similar situation for fridges.
Much of the UK's WEEE reprocessing capacity now rests in the hands of Sims, environCom, which owns what it claims is the UK's largest WEEE reprocessing plant, at Grantham in Lincolnshire (see letsrecycle.com story) and Viridor – which operates WEEE facilities in St Helens on Merseyside and in Perth, Scotland.
Despite the relative infancy of the UK WEEE sector, with the WEEE Regulations taking effect in July 2007, it has already seen some notable market consolidation, with Viridor acquiring its two plants in March 2008 from Shore Recycling (see letsrecycle.com story) which had, in turn, acquired the St Helens plant from M Baker Recycling.
The sector has also seen one WEEE reprocessor, Essex-based Coolrec, enter administration as a result of strong competition in the UK market (see letsrecycle.com story).
At the same time, a number of reprocessing facilities nationwide are rumoured to be operating at well below capacity, as companies await the expected boost to their input that the introduction of higher WEEE recycling targets proposed under the recast of the EU WEEE Directive looks set to provide (see letsrecycle.com story).
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