Plastic recycling firm Bright Green Plastics announced on 21 June that it had invested a seven-figure sum in upgrading and expanding the capacity of its Yorkshire facility with the purchase of a new wash plant and upgraded extruder.
The company, previously known as ImerPlast, rebranded to Bright Green Plastics last year after becoming independent from parent company IMERYS, in late 2019. It now recovers and repurposes discarded plastic, processing more than 40,000 tonnes of the UK’s plastic waste every year.
Processing up to five tonnes per hour, the new wash plant, which recycles all its own water, is designed to shred, wash, purify and granulate post-consumer waste into ready-to-recycle flake product.
The upgraded extruder is designed to melt the disused plastic and transform it into recycled pellets, ready to be put back into the manufacturing cycle. It will process up to three tonnes of PP and PE plastic per hour.
Both machines are planned to be fully operational by the end of the year, in time for the EU's new packaging levy and the UK plastic tax, which will be applied to manufactured or imported plastic packaging that does not contain at least 30 per cent recycled material.
The new equipment will increase the firm’s reprocessing capacity by two-thirds and allow it to work with material previously too difficult to handle, such as flexible plastics.