One of the UK's recycling experts, Paul Dumpleton, director for materials management at waste company Shanks, said that major issues surrounding the collection of the material needed much more attention.
Other views expressed to letsrecycle.com include the fact that the technology to process mixed plastics and produce plastic posts or other such material is not “a particular challenge”.
And, the British Plastics Federation still highlights the potential for capturing energy from the incineration of mixed plastics.
WRAP, however, is anxious to move ahead with its plans. Last month it outlined its hopes of increasing Britain's mixed plastics reprocessing capacity to 500,000 tonnes by 2018 (see letsrecycle.com story).
This would see the development of a mixed plastics recycling plant capable of recycling 40,000 tonnes of mixed plastic a year.
Launching a tender for the project, entitled ‘Commercial scale mixed plastics recycling trial', the organisation explained: “This project involves sorting mixed plastics from a domestic co-mingled waste stream in MRFs, a large scale trial of the optimum mixed plastics recycling process and a detailed economic assessment of the commercial sustainability of each element.”
However, speaking to letsrecycle.com, Mr Dumpleton questioned how the materials would be extracted from incoming recyclables in commingled facilities and expressed fears that the plans could be seen as representing support for source-separated collections.
Methods
He said that there was certainly the technology to extract a wide variety of different polymers from commingled material streams, but warned that materials recycling facilities may not have the room or ability to retro-fit the technology.
He said: “We must remember it is not only the identification system but the storage capacity that goes with it.”
In addition, he pointed out that since there was only technology to sort plastics by polymer type rather than as a group, then logically the sorted plastic material could go straight to an end user rather than to WRAP's proposed mixed plastics recycling facility.
Mr Dumpleton also draw attention to the issue of quality of material, warning that composite packaging posed a high risk of contamination, as seen in Germany.
There, contamination was caused by a range of items such as sweet wrappers made of cellophane and foil. “As the composition is hard to detect it could potentially flow into other materials such as paper grades,” he explained.
Mr Dumpleton said: “At a time when we really are getting on top of quality issues, we have to be very careful that we do not take on additional material without having looked at all of the potential issues that goes with it.”
Questions
Mr Dumpleton urged WRAP to provide greater clarity on its proposals. He said: “I am fully supportive of the new WRAP initiative but I am confused as to how this will work in practice for commingled MRFs.”
“What we need right from the start is effective communication to all stakeholders, trials that are fully transparent and encompass different types of facilities and lastly confirmation that this is not just something seen as a source-segregated collection proposal by a different name,” he added.
The closing deadlines for tenders is August 25 for the ‘Commercial scale mixed plastics recycling trial' and August 15 for a second tender looking at development of techniques to enhance mixed plastics recycling, entitled ‘Research and development to improve the recyclability of mixed plastics packaging'.
Subscribe for free