It’s official: landfill is pretty much history as far as heavy-duty plastic packaging is concerned. A combination of high polymer prices, increasingly stringent regulation and some highly-engineered technology has now made it possible for the UK’s reconditioning industry to clean up packs for repeated use or else render down for recycling the most contaminated industrial packaging thrown its way.
Industrial bulk containers (IBCs) and drums for toxic materials haven’t been seen in the vicinity of a landfill site since the Hazardous Waste directive came into effect in 2005. With incineration largely unviable, making these packs fit for recycling became standard practice – an option now increasingly being extended to less dangerous, but equally contaminated containers for products such as paints, solvents, inks and adhesives, says the Industrial Packaging Association (IPA) chief executive Phil Pease.
“The current trading climate has undoubtedly impacted on sales turnover for both new and reconditioned industrial packaging, yet the demand for their collection and safe recovery remains as strong as ever,” he says. “There’s an expanding, international customer base demanding alternatives to traditional disposal methods and a reduction in costs – not least with polymer prices at around £120 per tonne and landfill costs hitting £48 per tonne in 2010.”
Technical developments
Having supplied systems to the Ministry of Defence for the cleaning down of aircraft engine components, Dewsbury-based Rotajet broke into the industrial packaging reconditioning market via an existing contract for equipment to wash out paint mixing vats, says managing director Colin Steward.
“Traditionally, they were using solvent-based cleaning methods based on dichloromethane,” he says. “It worked, but it’s basically Nitromors: safe enough in low volume for household DIY, but carcinogenic with the effect that it can lead to dangerous levels of exposure in industrial applications.
“As a result of developing machinery using an alternative water-based solution for cleaning out the mixing vessels, we were able to extend into the packaging itself – an unanticipated market application that we were able to develop through straightforward technology transfer.”
The industrial packaging reconditioning sector now accounts for more than 20% of Rotajet’s turnover. It has a booming export order book and has installed more than 20 systems in the UK which will shred and clean drums and IBCs, or else wash them down for extended usage.
The Rotajet D60, which costs around £35,000, will clean a single 1,000-litre IBC, four separate drums or else 25-litre containers (in groups of 16) in roughly 10-15 minutes, subject to the level of contamination. An IBC can go through the process as many as half a dozen times.
Scaling up reuse efforts
Higher up the scale is the £250,000 Rotajet washing system recently installed by Leeds-based WasteCare’s industrial packaging division PackCare. This was part of a £1m upgrade investment aimed at cleaning up its reuse and recycling act, says group managing director Peter Hunt.
“The centrepiece of what we’ve installed is geared towards IBCs, for which we’re running an automated line that effectively undertakes a re-manufacturing process,” says Hunt. “The IBC is pressure-tested, cleaned and dried. When it comes off the other end, it looks to all intents and purposes like a new container.”
Whereas previously a lot of this packaging was considered to be disposable after just one trip, the company is now able to get upwards of 10 trips out of the same container. “There hasn’t been a watershed moment. It’s been an evolutionary process,” explains Hunt. “What has caused it to increase rapidly over the past 12 months are the big increases in plastic costs last year, which made people aware that they should be a bit more intelligent about what they were doing with the used containers.”
Regulation has also meant that landfill has got more expensive, so people aren’t quite so quick to throw things away. “It’s all helped to tilt the balance towards reuse or recycling rather than disposal,” he adds. “What we can’t refurbish and recertify as a container is processed, granulated and recovered; literally zero now goes to landfill.”
Even though their investment has been amortised over the next five years, indications suggest that it’s already paying off. According to Hunt, the new line is processing an IBC at the rate of one every eight minutes and operating on a six-day, extended 12-hour shift basis. “Eighty-five per cent of what we handle can now be considered working containers, as opposed to being granulated,” says Hunt. “It was below 50% before the new system was put in place.
“Everyone has gained: the customer wins because he no longer has the problem sitting in his backyard and is saving a fortune by not spending nearly £100 per item for a one-trip use; and the container manufacturer benefits because he can extend into new markets,” he says.
Track-and-trace fleet
Logistics specialist TDG also made inroads into the industrial packaging market when longstanding customer JohnsonDiversey, a leading provider of commercial cleaning, sanitation and hygiene products and systems, asked the firm to scale-up its existing service by project-managing its requirements for IBCs.
“We’re not a reconditioner, nor a packaging manufacturer, so we established a dedicated track-and-trace transport fleet for the collection of used packaging; consolidated at our Batley site where the packaging is cleaned out; and repositioned back at the customer’s Nottingham base,” explains TDG tank cleaning industrial packaging operation general manager Ann Dawson.
TDG developed a joint venture with NCG UK, in conjunction with its supplier Mauser, that operates as a fully-equipped reconditioning service. It undertakes the destructive recovery of severely contaminated packs, ranging from IBCs to 25-litre jerry-cans. The granulated waste is transferred across to another partner, Axion Recycling.
Unique selling point
Already maintaining a nationwide transport network, TDG is different in that it will retrieve any kind of plastic from anywhere in the country, providing it amounts to a pay-load of four shrinkwrapped pallets. NCG has subsequently replicated its closed-loop model for other logistics customers, and while its shredder has only been in operation since June, it will shortly be looking to extend the destructive recovery side of its new business.
However, not everyone is convinced that extending an IBC’s life-expectancy is the best option. For rebottling specialist Delta Containers in Manchester, recycling is clearly the preferred option. Managing director Adam White explains the maths and the logic. “Each ‘bottle’ I sell has a polymer value of, say, £7.50. If I was to wash an IBC, my overhead would be £25. I could probably sell it on for £45, but how much would I have to invest to make that viable? Say it amortises out at another £10 per IBC, so my margin’s dropped to £10. If I’m already able to make £7.50 margin on the polymer value, it doesn’t really warrant the capital investment.”
Delta recently installed a Herbold shredder, now cleaning and granulating around 750kg per hour of contaminated plastic. It runs on two eight-hour shifts, five days a week.
While it might not always be financially worthwhile to clean industrial packaging, more often than not, investment in this equipment can provide financial and environmental benefits to a company. TDG and Rotajet are among companies making sizeable investments in equipment, which look set to reap them big rewards in the future.
TRADPAK: IBC RECYCLING GOES NATIONWIDE
Having successfully completed a management buy-out of Pack2Pack’s plastics division in June, former directors David Roebuck and Gareth Worthy have invested more than £500,000 in the renamed TradPak industrial packaging recycling operation based at Brighouse. The site is on track towards processing around 75,000 IBCs per year on behalf of a 1,500-strong nationwide customer base, and is the UK’s largest facility of its kind.
While TradPak continues to work in partnership with the previous owners on the collection of materials, the management buy-out team are banking on its extensive experience in recycling and waste management to turn around an operation which, they say, had been under-performing due to insufficient investment.
Star of the new set-up is a fully-automated wash-line, which includes a pressure tester and a quality control module that can clean two IBCs in just five minutes. What would hitherto have been carried out manually by nine men equipped with jet guns can now be performed by a team of three in half the time. The system was installed last month and has already earned the nickname of ‘Carlsberg’ – because it’s probably the best wash-line in the world, says managing director Roebuck.
The overall operation is the established mix of reconditioning and recycling. Everything is checked as it comes off the vehicle, explains Roebuck. IBCs or drums that can be refurbished are put through the new automated wash-line, and sold back into the market. With the ones that go for scrap, the metal is taken away and recovered; the plastic is put through the shredding unit, which washes, dries and granulates down to a 5ml specification, he says. This is then bagged and sold back for plastic manufacture of garden furniture, kerb-stones, sleepers and even B&Q paint-rollers.
With the site operating on a single-shift, five-days-a-week basis, the company has recently invested in added transport for the collection of smaller used containers as a next-stage extension of the business. TradPak has also invested in an effluent plant to handle compostable waste. The operation is so thorough that the only plastic that might find its way to landfill is the film wrapping off the lunch-time sandwiches.
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