Recently concerns have been raised on the online forum clubrecycle that organisations such as charities and schools who collect bottle tops to sell to recyclers struggle to find anywhere to take the bottle tops.
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Gus Harris, director at GHS Recycling, has been accepting plastic, polyethylene bottle tops from the Naomi House Children's Hospice in Winchester for around 50 to 60 a tonne. Naomi House is a children's hospice that provides care and respite for children suffering life-limiting conditions from across South England.
GHS Recycling then granulate the plastic and sell it on to a processor in the Midlands that GHS has a long term relationship with. Mr Harris has said that most of the bottles are HDPE plastic, although some are labelled as LDPE.
Mr Harris claims that when people get behind such a collection scheme it is possible to collect enough material for viable recycling.
He said: “Naomi House can collect up to half a tonne a week and I am prepared to put a machine on the plastic at a tonne. When an organisation like Naomi House gets the message out, it is very easy to quickly collect a great deal.”
Naomi House enlists help from schools and charities in the local area to collect bottle tops. A spokeswoman for the organisation said: “We aim to raise 8,000 through our recycling, which will go towards covering our fuel bill. Last year we raised around 4,000 through the recycling scheme.”
But Mr Harris has said that the collectors have to do their bit in keeping to certain types of bottle top if the process is to work. “The only concern I have is for contamination, but from Naomi House I only take milk bottle tops. Other tops are different material and I don't have a machine capable of separating them. As long as the tops are sorted properly and the cardboard or foil wads that go inside the tops are removed it is very easy to recycle.”
And Mr Harris believes it is possible for charities elsewhere to set up a similar relationship to the one he has with the children's hospice. He feels that charities need to find a “friendly” reprocessor who will be prepared to take the material off of them. As long as the tops are properly sorted and quality controlled then any organisation or charity can probably sell the material on locally.
Sceptical
However another plastic recycler told letsrecycle.com that he doesn't see much of an industry for the recycling of bottle tops in this country any time soon.
Colin Williamson, managing director at Smile Plastics in Shropshire, said: “I am very sceptical about the collection of plastic bottle tops. It just isn't worth it, you would need about 100,000 to make a tonne, and it's unlikely that someone will collect that.”
But Mr Williamson said that if someone was to provide him with enough bottle tops he would be prepared to work with the material.
He said: “If someone comes along with around 50 kilos of mixed colour plastic bottle tops then I would be willing to give it a try. I wouldn't be prepared to pay for it, but we could certainly run trials using it.”
Mr Williamson has said that the poor collection rate of recyclable plastic in the UK does not help bottle top recycling. The lightness of the material means it is not seen as important as other materials to local authorities who are more concerned with weightier recyclables, he said. Charities and schools are the only organisations that tend to collect bottle tops, but unless they are well supported like Naomi House they will struggle to provide enough.
Mr Williamson explained that the UK collects around 15,000 tonnes of recyclable plastic from households compared to 600,000 in Germany. In Germany bottle top recycling is a possibility because of the vast amount that are collected from homes, Mr Williamson said, even pointing out that if he were inclined he could import bottle tops from Europe.
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