Novelis concern over “deterioration” in can sorting quality

In an interview with letsrecycle.com, the company's national business manager, Andy Doran, said his company has seen a “significant deterioration” in the quality of cans from some of its suppliers.

Although Novelis has a reputation for setting fairly stringent quality specifications for cans, Mr Doran said the difference in price between clean and poor quality cans would pay for the kind of sorting needed to boost recycling rates and incomes.

He said: “We have been paying prices of 1,000 a tonne at some points this year for cans – but someone sending us poorer quality cans would get 300 per tonne less. That difference in price is enough to fund pickers to hand-sort those cans.”

Contracts
Speaking as a former LARAC chairman with many years of local authority experience before his move to Novelis, Mr Doran warned that councils are often not concerned with material value went specifying their recycling contracts.

He said: “We don't think local authorities all know the value of the end market when they are specifying their contracts, but prices are clearly stated. My concern is that waste management companies have a licence to operate that is unconstrained by the end market.”

“For me it depends how the contracts are structured between local authorities, waste management companies and end markets. They are usually based on volume – but we've got to get the quality out,” the Novelis national manager added.

Mr Doran added: “Aluminium has always been a low priority for local authorities because of the weight-based targets. It is only 1% of the volume of waste, but it can be 25% of the value of your recycling box. There is a certain amount of mentality that still sees this as waste disposal.”

Cans waiting to be melted down at the Novelis plant in Warrington – UK cans must be blended with cleaner cans from countries like Sweden because of their poor quality

Commingled
Novelis is actively advising local authorities to separate cans at source where possible, rather than going down the commingled route. But Mr Doran accepted that the move to make recycling easier for householders meant more and more local authorities are choosing to collect materials together for sorting at MRFs.

Mr Doran said he believed WRAP's estimates for the growth of commingled collections were “fairly conservative”, and that the move away from source-separation was accelerating.

While the company is pushing the need to separate at source, Mr Doran said it is possible for MRFs to meet the quality specifications, and there are some good examples out there. But too often aluminium is seen as an afterthought in the structuring of MRFs, he said.

He said: “Aluminium is one of the smaller streams, so it gets sorted quite late in the process. We have seen configurations that will pull out Tetra Paks and cat food cartons with the cans, all because they have a small aluminium content.”

The main contaminant causing a headache for Novelis is plastic bottles, since the inclusion of plastic in aluminium cans disrupts the reprocessing line at the company's Warrington can-melting plant.

“During the de-lacquering process, which occurs at 550 degrees, the plastics burn. Although this doesn't affect the emissions because we have emissions controls, it raises the temperature of the process, and that shuts down the machine,” Mr Doran explained.

With Novelis taking in thousands of tonnes of aluminium cans from deposit schemes in Scandinavia, which are generally much cleaner than UK cans, Novelis has to blend UK cans in with its foreign cans to cope with the poorer quality.

Strategy
Novelis has been encouraged by Defra's hints that its new English waste strategy may take a life-cycle approach towards materials recycling targets.

The company accepts that packaging producer responsibility via the “boom and bust” PRN system may not have provided long-term investment needed to reach the European packaging recovery targets under the Packaging Directive.

But Mr Doran insisted that aluminium producers were providing as much support to councils as they could.

He said: “I don't think there's a vast much more that the aluminium sector can do to support collections – our prices for aluminium cans are clear, and we can help with investment in sorting equipment and with marketing.”