Despite the increasing importance of “corporate social responsibility”, recycling company Berryman said too many UK breweries are unwilling to provide any support for the UK's only national glass recycling service for licensed premises.
”When we acquired the Recycle-More-Glass scheme from Valpak in mid 2003 we were on record as stating that it would present a formidable challenge. “
– Mick Keogh, Berryman
Two years after taking over the service from compliance scheme Valpak, Berryman has cancelled the scheme because the economics of collecting glass from licensed pubs, bars and hotels does not add up.
Mick Keogh, general manager at Berryman, said the Recycle-More-Glass service made up about 8% to 9% of the company's total tonnage. The scheme had collected from over 10,000 public houses and catering establishments, and is thought to have been collecting about 80,000 tonnes of material a year.
Mr Keogh: “When we acquired the Recycle-More-Glass scheme from Valpak in mid 2003 we were on record as stating that it would present a formidable challenge. We believed that we had the expertise and contacts to operate the scheme, and still do.”
Difficult
Recycling the glass from licensed premises is difficult because there is not the available collection infrastructure as there is in the municipal sector. The job is made even harder because glass that is collected is generally mixed glass, with high levels of green glass which has poor demand in the UK at the moment.
Mr Keogh said: “We overestimated the return we would get in glass tonnages for the investment that we would need to make. When we introduced modest charges earlier this year, although we did gain the support of some of the licensed premises that we had been servicing free of charge, many of them were reluctant to agree to a longer term arrangement.”
Local
Berryman is now in the process of trying to set up local-scale collection services to serve as many of the Recycle-More-Glass licensed premises as possible. The company has been talking to a number of contractors who it believes are in a better position to provide the service, and hopes are it could still become one of their major sources for obtaining the glass.
Steve Hope, national collections manager (Licensed Premises) at Berryman, said: “In some areas where we can, we have passed on the service to subcontractors. We are in the process of dealing with the other areas to try and keep the continuity going. Hopefully the service will still be there, but it won't be under the Recycle-More-Glass banner.”
”In some areas where we can, we have passed on the service to subcontractors. We are in the process of dealing with the other areas to try and keep the continuity going.“
– Steve Hope, Berryman
The company said it is to concentrate on its mainstream domestic kerbside and bring activities through local authorities and community groups.
Mr Keogh said it was “regrettable” that the company did not get the support from industry that Berryman had expected to make Recycle More Glass a viable operation.
Municipal
He said: “With the investments that we are making in new state of the art cullet treatment plants and the growth particularly in kerbside schemes across the country, we want to concentrate all our efforts on helping our local authority customers meet their targets as well as providing our long-term recycling partner Rockware Glass with the highest quality of cullet.”
The lack of a viable collection system for glass from licensed premises will not make it any easier for the UK to hit the producer responsibility targets under the Packaging Directive. To reach the recovery and recycling targets set by Europe for 2008, experts believe that every year 125,000 extra tonnes of glass will have to be collected.
Perhaps ironically, the breweries themselves may find it more expensive to comply with their obligations under the UK's packaging regulations as a result of the loss of Recycle-More-Glass and the proven lack of viability for such a service.
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