Jayplas opens food grade plastics facility at Corby

Plastics recycling firm Jayplas (J&A Young) has officially started operations at its 30,000 tonnes-a-year capacity food grade plastics reprocessing facility in Northamptonshire and revealed plans to develop another plant of equal size as early as summer 2011.

The company claimed that the development, which is its first food grade plant, would move the UK plastic reprocessing sector “to the next level”. Jayplas – which is the trade name for J&A Young – already operates six UK facilities and one in China.

Jayplas purchased the Saxon Way East site in Corby in October 2009 and has turned the former home of a printing company into a state-of-the-art plastic bottle recycling facility.

A spokesman for the company told letsrecycle.com: “PET recycling within the UK is still in its infancy. Previous issues with quality and outputs are well documented.”

However, Jayplas hopes to make significant improvements in the quality of material available to UK bottle & sheet manufacturers.

“We are confident that the investment & technology used at our Corby facility will move PET recycling in the UK to a new level. We are committed to improving the recycling infrastructure within the UK and this will see a reduction in imports of material from Europe and the Far East,” the spokesman said.

The development of recycled PET (R-PET) for use in food-contact packaging has grown in the UK in recent years, with Jayplas now joining Viridor Polymer Recycling (VPR), AWS Eco Plastics and Closed Loop Recycling as the main reprocessors of the material from a PET source. Greenstar WES also develops food grade plastic but from HDPE material (see letsrecycle.com story).

Plant

In the 21,500 square metre Corby plant, PET bottles and flakes are sorted via a Ti-Tech NIR optical sorting system with the wash plant system provided by Italian plastic recycling specialist Sorema. The food grade extrusion element of the process is being supplied by Austrian company Erema.

The Sorema system takes whole PET plastic bottles from the sorting process and granulates and then washes them to produce ‘super clean' hot washed PET flakes. The process removes caps, labels, glues and dirt. The Vacurema extrusion equipment then processes the flake to produce a food contact rPET granule.

This process has been ratified by EFSA and Jayplas has a “rigid quality testing regime” throughout the process using a dedicated on-site laboratory.

At the end of the process, the Jayplas facility will have produced both ‘super clean' PET flakes and also food contact grade rPET granules.

Feedstock for the plant is set to be sourced from the company's South Normanton plant in Derbyshire. The 80,000 tonnes-a-year capacity mixed plastic recycling facility was opened by Jayplas in August 2008 and was the most recent major development for the company (see letsrecycle.com story).

As well as opening the food grade plant, Jayplas has also opted to move its head office to the Corby site from its existing location at Oakham in Rutland.

And, the firm has outlined plans to develop another food-grade plastic recycling and reprocessing facility on the same scale as the Corby plant. The company is tight-lipped about the location, although it has stated that it could be developed “as soon as summer 2011”.