Site named for 17m ELV plastics recycling plant

A joint venture set up to build a plant to reprocess plastics from end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) has announced that it intends to develop the £17. 1 million facility at Worksop in Nottinghamshire.

The facility is being developed by metals recycling firm European Metal Recycling (EMR) and American plastics recycling company MBA Polymers and will process 60,000 tonnes of post-shredder material a year.

Plans to develop the facility were announced last April (see letsrecycle.com story), however, the company experienced delays in locating the site.

David Ireland, director of technical services at EMR, said, “The site selection has taken longer than expected as it was important to find the right location to maximise the benefits of lower logistical costs with suitable markets for the finished goods.

“We can now move quickly to complete this project and start recovering plastic from shredder waste in early 2010. This is an important development in EMR's goal of eliminating waste from our shredder operations,” he added.

When the plant – which is set to be developed under the name MBA Polymers UK – was first announced last year it was considered a “breakthrough” in helping the UK reach the End of Life Vehicle (ELV) Directive target of reusing and recycling 95% of ELVs by 2015.

Welcomed

The announcement about the proposed site was welcomed by members of the ELV recycling community.

Concerns had been raised in the ELV sector that the UK and Europe would struggle to meet the 2015 target due to a shortage of post-shredder residue reprocessing capacity (see letsrecycle.com story).

Commenting on the Worksop plant, Duncan Wemyss, secretary of the Motor Vehicle Dismantlers Association, told letsrecycle.com: “It is a most needed step and they should be applauded. In relation to ELVs we have to achieve a recycling rate of 80% of the actual weight and, at the moment, it isn't unfair to say that we are just a smidgen short of that.”

“This plant will go a long way to achieving our next target of 85%, if they are able to reprocess 5% then we will be some way to reaching that target but in 2015 that figure reaches 95%. As you can see, this plant is needed and I am delighted,” he added.

Mr Wemyss highlighted that more capacity was still needed and claimed that metal recycling firm Sims Group and Dutch-company Auto-Recycling Nederland (ARN) were also considering the development of similar plants in the UK and Europe.