Following the agreement to sell the assets, accountancy firm Deloitte in Leeds is now overseeing matters pertaining to Evolve Polymers. Creditors of the business are expected to be contacted within the next week regarding any potential pay out to them.
A pre-pack arrangement is an insolvency process which sees the sale of the assets of a business negotiated prior to an administrator’s appointment.
The 150,000 tonnes-per-year capacity PET plastic bottle recycling facility at Hemswell, Lincolnshire, is now trading under the name Clean Tech Europe, in the wake of the pre-pack deal completed on Wednesday (2 November). Contracts with Evolve’s existing “key business partners” will continue, Plastipak said.
Plastipak’s US-based directors William Young, Francis Pollock and Michael Plotzke registered the company name Clean Tech Europe Ltd on 25 October. Within the UK Plastipak has its main operation in Wrexham where it acquired the plastics firm APPE in 2015. Evolve’s chief executive Chris Brown, prior to joining Evolve, spent five years at APPE in Wrexham, as plant manager and later business development director.
Aurelius
In this week’s purchase (see letsrecycle.com story), Plastipak Europe has bought the assets of Evolve Polymers from German investment firm Aurelius less than two years after the Bavarian company became involved in the Lincolnshire business.
Aurelius itself acquired the assets of Eco Plastics, including the multi-million pound Hemswell plant, in a pre-pack arrangement in December 2014.
That deal saw Eco Plastics left with debts of around £14 million. From then on, the plant operated under the Evolve Polymers name (see letsrecycle.com story). Eco Plastics’ creditors received around 2p for every £1 owed by the business.
Those to lose out included WRAP, which wrote off a £1.65 million loan it provided to Eco Plastics to aid the development of the facility.
rPET
The plant has also received investment from Coca Cola Enterprises – now Coca Cola European Partners – through a joint venture company with Eco Plastics, known as Continuum Recycling. This was set up to supply a long-term source of rPET for use in bottle manufacturing by Coca Cola Enterprises.
However, the soft drinks giant left the joint venture following the 2014 pre-pack deal, with Aurelius acquiring Eco Plastics’ shares in Continuum – of which it held 66% – for £1, and adopting a £5 million debt due from Eco Plastics to Continuum.
Coca Cola has continued to source rPET from the Hemswell facility since the takeover by Aurelius, and a spokesperson for the company today told letsrecyle.com that Coca Cola European Partners will continue to buy rPET for use in its bottling plants from Hemswell.
‘Support’
The company said: “Coca-Cola European Partners is one of the very few soft drinks businesses to be supporting the GB recycling sector and we remain fully committed to using recycling materials in our packaging.
“This includes the continuation of our long term agreement for the supply of rPET with Evolve Polymers (EP), now under Plastipak’s ownership. This new agreement is all part of our ambition to build on our track record of using rPET in GB and in line with our commitment to use recycled and renewable materials in our packaging.”
The Hemswell bottle recycling facility is a seen as a key piece of plastics recycling infrastructure within the UK, with a large proportion of the PET plastic bottles collected from households across the country processed at the facility.
Aurelius has overseen an overhaul of the Hemswell operation since taking over – re-focusing the buying strategy by purchasing a smaller proportion of mixed plastic bottles for sorting at the plant and instead focusing on a pure PET feedstock.
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