The plant at South Normanton is capable of sorting 78,000 tonnes of plastics bottles and some mixed plastics a year collected from local authorities, large national supermarkets and small industrial businesses.
Rosie Barber, commercial manager of J&A Young, said: “The site is designed not just to sort mixed plastic bottles but to sort residual soft plastics as well – such as yoghurt pots and butter tubs.”
The company, which has been operating since 1975, at present runs two other sites in Loughborough – including an 80,000 square foot production plant which reprocesses plastic film into refuse sacks and new film.
Derby
At the South Normanton site, baled plastics are put through a rigorous sorting process, which removes any contaminants – such as paper and plastic bags – and divides the material by polymer type and colour using TiTech optical sorting technology.
The technology analyses all plastics put past it with a fast-moving scanning sensor fitted over the conveyor belt, which identifies materials, shapes, textures and colours as well as the object position in a split second.
Once TiTech has defined the plastic's polymer type or colour, the plastic is blown onto a second transport system using high power air jets, while the non-plastic (residual fraction) is brought to a third belt for further sorting or disposal. The end product, after being sorted by colour and type, is then rebaled and readied for sale to plastics reprocessors.
Teething
In its first few weeks since opening on August 1, the J&A Young site has encountered some minor teething problems, such as problems with the walking floor.
The floor, which allows contaminants to sink through the bottom of the floor, while paper and plastic bags are pushed upwards and bottles are pushed back into the system, currently has holes which are too wide, allowing a number of plastic bottle tops to pass through rather than being recycled.
However, the company is due to rectify this in coming weeks and said it would not in any way impinge on the quality of sorted material being baled at the end.
Dave Lewin, project engineering manager at the Derby facility, said: “When it opened, we pressed the start button and it ran straight for 24 hours, which is pretty much unheard of.”
Closed Loop
The South Normanton site is also part of J&A Young's pledge to offer customers a ‘closed-loop' recycling service, where producers are given back the plastics they recycle to use again in the food grade plastics process.
The company said that it is currently scouting locations for a fourth site, which would be capable of allowing J&A Young to wash, extrude and cool pelletized polymers before selling them on to plastics producers.
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