Specialising in the reprocessing of PVC bottles and PET, the Reprise bottle reprocessing plant was one of the first in Europe designed to automatically separate mixed plastic bottles into clean streams of PET, HDPE and PVC.
The company developed relationships with collection schemes and also accepted bales of pre-sorted PET (clear and green), PVC (clear) and HDPE (all grades) bottles for recycling purposes.
In recent years the company has been a “sister” company of Delleve, the Stratford-on-Avon-based plastic recycler and details of the Reprise process are shown on the Delleve website. A spokesman for the company said that he could not make any comment about the Reprise situation at the present time.
Specialised
Delleve itself has emerged as one of the most successful of the UK's plastic bottle recyclers and has specialised in the polyethylene market producing products such as pipes from recycled material.
In contrast, Reprise has suffered huge competition from the export market which has sucked large volumes of bottles out of the UK. And, it is thought that the low value of packaging waste recovery notes (PRNs) is also a factor.
Colin Williamson, chair of the British Plastics Federation's recycling committee, said: “This is an indication of the very difficult trading conditions that most plastic recycling companies have been experiencing for the last 18 months. The price of PRNs has fallen to single figures and so many councils are exporting material rather than looking to have the material processed in the UK.”
Barriers
News of the difficulties affecting Reprise comes as the Waste and Resources Action Programme published a report identifying the major barriers to plastics recycling in the UK (see letsrecycle.com story). But, the plastics recycling organisation Recoup moved to reassure the local authority waste sector that the collection and recycling of plastic bottles is a viable operation despite the events at Reprise.
A statement from Recoup said: “Recoup is keen to see the development of high quality bottle recycling capacity in the UK. Any loss of availability of domestic capacity to recycle plastic bottles will be unwelcome. However, for the majority of suppliers, any changes at Reprise resulting from this decision should not impact on their ability to sell collected plastic bottles.”
Subscribe for free