New joint venture to recycle UK’s shredder residue

Archiv – A new company in the United Kingdom, called MBA Polymers UK, will recover plastics from upgraded shredder residue. The newly formed joint venture is initiated by MBA Polymers, Inc. (MBA) from Richmond, California, USA and Warrington, UK-based European Metal Recycling Limited (EMR) and will start operation of a 60 000 tonnes per year processing plant by early 2009.United Kingdom | A new company in the United Kingdom, called MBA Polymers UK, will recover plastics from upgraded shredder residue. The newly formed joint venture is initiated by MBA Polymers, Inc. (MBA) from Richmond, California, USA and Warrington, UK-based European Metal Recycling Limited (EMR) and will start operation of a 60 000 tonnes per year processing plant by early 2009.
For the joint venture, which is primarily owned by MBA, EMR will concentrate the plastics fraction of the shredder residue produced from its large-scale metal recycling operations. This additional processing will also allow EMR to capture a higher percentage of the metals. The new plant will receive concentrated plastics-rich material from EMR’s facilities around the UK and will clean, sort and upgrade the plastics, and will then sell the high quality plastics to MBA’€™s customers.
MBA and EMR consider this announcement a major milestone for both companies and for recycling in Europe in general. MBA and EMR also believe that this JV represents not only an important business for both companies; it provides large social and environmental benefits as well.
Michael Biddle, MBA’€™s founder and President, says: ’MBA Polymers UK will allow usto continue to expand our product offerings to our customers around the world who are responding to growing internal and external pressures to manufacture more sustainable products and who are increasing their use of recycled plastics. These customers also want to have more access to the state-of-the-art answer MBA offers for the plastics from their end-of-life products.’€™
David Ireland, EMR’€™s Director of Technical Services says: ‘€˜EMR is a leader in metals recycling and this collaboration with MBA will make us a leader in plastic recycling too. It is a very significant step not only for EMR and MBA but for the UK too as this investment will allow us to recover the previously untapped plastic resource in the materials we recycle. Not only will this divert materials from landfill and generate significant CO2 savings but it will also put EMR at the forefront in meeting the very demanding recycling targets set under producer responsibility regimes in vehicle and electronics recycling. These targets are very exacting and can only be met by applying new technologies to the recovery of plastics. We have been working with MBA for some time on this problem and we are very excited that we have now reached the stage where we can announce our intention to build a plant in the UK.’€™