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New equipment boost for recycler Recresco&#39s expansion plans

Nottinghamshire-based recycling firm Recresco is undertaking a major expansion programme that will boost the amount of glass and plastics it can process.

The company, which changed its name from Midland Glass last year, is upgrading its plant in Kirkby-in-Ashfield to increase the amount of glass colour separation it can carry out. And, Recresco has upgraded its plastic baling equipment – supplied by Kendalls Engineering – to keep up with its flourishing plastic collection business.

Equipment to a value of 300,000 has been leased with the assistance of WRAP's eQuip scheme, which sees the Waste and Resources Action Programme accepting the financial risk for the banks providing the equipment finance (see letsrecycle.com story). Funding for Recresco's new equipment has come from Bank of Scotland Asset Finance.

Plastics
Tim Gent, director at Recresco, said that the company is particularly pushing the plastics side of its business at the moment, since prices for the recycled material are “solid”.

The company has developed a system which it says can improve the economics of local authority plastic bottle collections. The system uses banks specially designed by local firm Nevilles to Recresco's design so that plastic bottles can be extracted with a vacuum for collection.

The company's three plastic bottle collection vehicles also have equipment onboard to pierce each bottle so that they can be compacted.

Mr Gent said: “We developed a complete system to allow our vehicles to collect more than 200 kilos of plastic. It pops the bottles and then compacts them, and each vehicle can collect four tonnes.”

Once collected, bottles are baled at the Nottinghamshire plant for export to the Far East, but the company is planning further developments at its plant that should see the material remaining in the UK. Mr Gent revealed: “We are investing in sorting equipment and once we do that, it will all go to the domestic market.”

Glass
As well as the plastics baling equipment, the eQuip scheme has allowed Recresco to lease two glass separators and a colour glass pre-sorter. This will be added to the company's existing glass reprocessing plant at Kirkby-in-Ashfield, and should give the plant about 50,000 tonnes capacity each year from December.

Eric Gent, who is also a director at Recresco, explained: “The separators remove non-glass items and will improve throughput, efficiency and product quality. The new pre-sorter will enable us to colour sort 20 tonnes of glass an hour – an improvement of 13 tonnes per hour on the previous machine.”

With more and more mixed glass coming from local authority collections, the company is being asked to sort more material. “The colour pre-sorter will enable us to recover more higher value clear and amber glass,” Mr Gent said.

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