Recresco seals landmark 100m glass recycling contract

The glass recycling firm, which has its headquarters in Nottingham, has announced that the £100 million deal will see cullet collected from within the UK delivered to Irish-owned Quinn Glass' state-of-the-art facility at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire, where around 90% will be reprocessed into bottles.

Tim Gent, a director of Recresco, said: “The award of this contract is possibly one of the most significant events in terms of glass recycling in the last ten years.

“Importantly it clearly demonstrates that through continuous development of new technologies and investment in new processing plants, Recresco is able to provide large quantities of recycled glass of the highest quality and purity,” he added.

Plant

In a bid to ensure the supply of cullet, Recresco is currently undertaking construction of a new sorting and processing plant at the site of its existing facility in Ellesmere Port. The new site will be capable of handling 4,000 tonnes of mixed glass a week.

Recresco has introduced technology at the plant which is capable of producing colour separated glass from mixed glass, with 90% of the mixed glass it processes used to produce new glass bottles and glass containers.

The development, which is due to open in six weeks time, is adjacent to Quinn Glass's own £300 million, 310,000 tonnes-a-year capacity manufacturing plant overlooking the River Mersey which opened in 2006.

Relationship

Adrian Curry, director of glass at Quinn, said: “The supply contract with Recresco Ltd was only signed after careful evaluation of their ability to meet our extremely high quality standards. For example, we demand almost 100% contaminate free glass; otherwise we risk reducing the quality of our product and interrupting our production process.

“We have worked with Recresco for a number of years, in this time we have established a close working relationship with them. This landmark contract not only provides considerable benefit to both Quinn Glass and Recresco Ltd, it does much to sustain the long term demand for recycled glass,” he added.

As part of the contract, the glass provided by Recresco is likely to be sourced from local authority kerbside collection schemes, bottle banks and also from commercial operators, who bulk glass at transfer loading stations.