PVC materials from the flooring, window, piping, and guttering markets, will be collected in the Reading and West London areas, with most of the material collected from the construction sector, and civic amenity sites.
The project comes as part of the European PVC industries voluntary commitment to the European Commission to reach set targets by 2010. Vinyl 2010The European PVC organisation co-ordinating the implementation of the voluntary commitment aims to recycle an additional 200,000 tonnes of post consumer waste by 2010.
Phil Law, director of public and industrial affairs at the BPF, the trade association for the UK plastics industry, said: “The trial will test methods of collection; sorting, separation, bulking and processing in order to provide vital data for future recycling initiatives.”
Axion
The contract to collect and recycle the PVC plastic was awarded to Yorkshire-based Axion Recycling Ltd, which hopes to collect 200 tonnes of material over the next 6 months. Axion will be placing collection skips at CA sites and at the sites of any organisation that wishes to take participate in the project.
The data collected will also be important to the project's success, Roger Morton, co-director and joint founder of Axion explained: “Through this trial we hope to locate the more fruitful areas for PVC collection, we can then look at a more long term goal. This kind of scheme has not been run anywhere in Europe, so there will be interest in it from across the EU.”
Axion are also currently involved in a “ground breaking” scheme funded by the Waste and Resources Action Program (WRAP) to extract brominated fire retardants from waste electrical and electrics equipment (WEEE). One of the major stumbling blocks for increased recycling from WEEE has been the need to extract obsolete brominated fire retardants from plastics before they can be re-used.
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