PackCare has purchased the Avonmouth facility from Greif UK Ltd, a global manufacturer of steel drums, pails and intermediate bulk container (IBC) packaging.
The plant is the only permitted thermal treatment facility dedicated to contaminated steel drums and other metal packaging in the UK, according to PackCare, following recent changes to regulatory guidance.
Due to the hazardous nature of the material, WM3 Guidance restricts unlicensed re-conditioners from disposing of the packaging via scrap processors to landfill.
Through the thermal treatment process deployed at Avonmouth, which operates at temperatures of over 600°c, PackCare will be able to clean the material to a standard that meets the IPPC and WID Directives.
The plant has also been approved as an accredited steel packaging reprocessor by the Environment Agency, allowing the company to issue steel PRNs on the clean metal extracted from the process.
The thermal process is suitable for a number of other recycling streams that have been classified as difficult wastes in WM3 Guidance, including paint cans, aerosols and domestic batteries.
Acquisitions
WasteCare, which is already able to process contaminated industrial plastics packaging at its facility in Leeds, claims that the Avonmouth purchase will be the first in a number of strategic acquisitions for the division in 2016.
Commenting on the acquisition, Peter Hunt, chairman of the WasteCare Group, said: “We are pleased to confirm the purchase of Greif’s thermal treatment facility in Avonmouth. The facility is the UK’s leading state of the art recovery operation for hazardous waste packaging, capable of processing over 2,000 steel drums per day.”
The Group has also appointed Gary Linard as the new commercial director of the PackCare division, who brings over 35 years’ experience in the waste sector to the role.
Mr Linard added: “Not only does our ‘R’ coded permitted facility offer the best available technology in Europe for processing contaminated packaging but we aim to use the thermal process for a number of other recycling processes for products that in the past have been considered difficult to manage.”
The WasteCare Group handles in excess of 70,000 tonnes of hazardous and ‘difficult’ waste annually from an estimated 40,000 organisations nationwide.
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