The facility, to be operated by Ecotech London, is located on the site of the former Express Recycling & Plastics Ltd rigid plastics sorting plant at the Fairview Industrial Park.
Among Ecotechs directors are LWARBs head of infrastructure and investment, Charlotte Eddington and head of finance James Lanman and David Sargent who separately holds the post of managing director of LondonWaste. And, chairman of Ecotech London is expected to be the former Shanks managing director Ian Goodfellow who is confirmed as a director of the PET firm.
Ecotech also has backing from Germany, in the form of director Markus Ingepass, who is sales manager at Bavarian plastics recycling equipment and recycling firm STF Group.
Ecotech London is expected to produce a recycled flake rather than pellet which is needed for bottlemaking.
Competition for feedstock for the new plant will be fierce. Two established firms, ECO Plastics, which operates a 150,000 tonnes-per-year capacityreprocessing facility at Hemswell in Lincolnshire, and Closed Loop Recycling, which operates a similar facility just under three miles from the Ecotech site dominate much of the PET bottle recycling market in the UK.
Rainham
The plastics sorting and reprocessing equipment which was in the Rainham plant when Express ceased operations had become the property of Regain Polymers which acquired the Rainham site in February 2012. However, Regain halted work at Rainham at the end of last month and has transferred the equipment to its main facility at Castleford in West Yorkshire.
LWARB is seen as very keen to develop plastics reprocessing infrastructure in London and this latest project follows soon after last autumns announcement of support for a plastic film and carrier bag recycling facility in the capital.
[updated 18 March 10:09 to reflect the use of recycled pellet in bottle making].
Biossence
News of LWARBs involvement in setting up the plastics plant comes after it was revealed that another East London based company which had received backing from the organisation has gone into administration.
Administrators from accountancy firm Milsted Langton have been appointed to oversee the operations of Biossence (East London), which had been provided funding of up to 8.9 million to develop a 100,000 tonnes-per-year waste gasification plant in Dagenham.
According to Milsted Langdon, the project, work on which was officially started by Mayor of London Boris Johnson in 2011 (see letsrecycle.com story), stalled after investors decided that they would not meet their targeted return from the venture.
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