Materials

Nampak is to set up its own closed-loop system for plastic packaging by building an HDPE reprocessing plant in north-east England.

The South African group said today (20 November) that the plant would produce up to 13,000 tonnes of food-grade recycled HDPE a year as it strives to introduce milk bottles with 30% recycled content by 2009.

Nampak Plastics was the first company to produce HDPE milk bottles with recycled content. It is supplying HDPE milk bottles with 10% recycled content to Marks & Spencer, following a successful trial that started in December 2006.

The materials for the new plant, which will be operational by the end of 2008, will be supplied by waste management companies from domestic waste.

It will supplement the 6,000 tonnes a year of recycled HDPE that Nampak has agreed to take from the £12m Closed Loop London reprocessing plant in Dagenham, which is due to open in the first quarter of 2008.

Nampak will reprocess the material solely for use in its own UK manufacturing operations, which make two billion plastic milk and juice bottles a year.

The M&S bottle was the culmination of a three-year project funded by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) that also involved Dairy Crest.

Nampak Plastics business development director James Crick said the firm was currently supplying M&S with "fairly small tonnages" of bottles with recycled content, but added that the "whole of the industry" was talking about recycling as a way to optimise packaging.

Crick also said Nampak hoped to get to 50% recycled content in the future.

He hoped the plant would "help stimulate demand for more HDPE from the UK waste stream" and could contribute, along with other reprocessing investment, to a "higher level of kerbside collections".