The new plant at Crumlin, near Belfast, is capable of sorting 10,000 tonnes of PET and HDPE plastic bottles each year.
 Irish Polymers believes its new autosort machine will mean recycled plastics being used in the UK, rather than sent to China |
It includes a manual “pre-sort” picking station, auto-sort equipment and baling facilities to process the plastic bottles.
The company says the 1 million investment will allow the recycled plastic to be used in the UK or Ireland, rather than being exported to the Far East. The philosophy behind the move to develop sorting facilities was that exporting plastic bottles “made economic sense but had a bigger environmental impact”.
Irish Polymers also believed that the “valuable feedstock materials was lost forever from home grown reprocessors both in Ireland and the UK.”
Marketing director Des Mullan explained: “Irish Polymers have been focused on the collection of plastic bottles for sometime and were aware of the unsustainable nature of exporting the bottles to China.
“It is our intention, where practical, to divert this material to end-use applications within Ireland – thus providing a truly closed loop solution to the recycling of plastic bottles,” he added.
Investment
Irish Polymers was started up in 1997 as a two man operation to collect plastic bottles and ship them to markets in mainland Britain.
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Funding for the new German-made plant has come from development agency Invest NI and through investment from Viridian Growth Funds, managed by Clarendon Fund Managers.
Irish Polymers believes that once up to full speed, the plant could handle about 60% of the plastic bottles currently being collected for recycling in Northern Ireland and the Republic.
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