Following its announcement in October that it planned to build a new 4.9-million-tonne PET recycling plant at Peel L&P Environmental’s 54-hectare strategic energy and resource hub, Protos, near Ellesmere Port, Cheshire in Cheshire, UK-based PET recycler Enviroo launched a consultation with local residents and businesses to hear from the community about the plan.
The company has now submitted a planning application to construct the facility.
“We were really pleased with the feedback we had from the consultation. Many respondents were really positive that this recycling facility would allow us to deal with more plastic waste on our shores and we look forward to engaging with the community on the benefits of recycling,” said Ahmed Detta, CEO & Founder of Enviroo.
The recycler said it plans to invest some £20m in the project. The new plant, which will be capable of re-using 100% of the PET it takes in, is expected to create 50 permanent jobs.
Enviroo will use proven technology from Erema and Sorema Technologies to sort and wash the waste, before creating r-PET (recycled -PET) pellets that can be used by packaging manufacturers to create new packaging products.
This will become increasingly important from April 2022, when a new law will see any packaging that contains less than 30% recycled PET taxed. Some manufacturers have gone further, pledging to include up to 50% recycled material in their packaging under the UK Plastics Pact.
The facility will be at the Plastic Park at Protos, which will cluster together plastic recycling and recovery technologies to create value from plastic waste, helping to avoid it ending up in landfill, exported overseas or in the oceans.
The £165m Plastic Park will include a range of innovative technologies that deal with different types of plastic, each designed to extract the most value from the waste, said Jayne Hennessy, Development Manager at Peel L&P Environmental.
“Whether it’s been mixed or sorted the Plastic Park will be able to deal with numerous types of plastic.”
A decision on the recycling facility is expected to be made early next year. If approved, the facility will be operational by the spring of 2022.