Credited with having opened one of the world’s first sorting plants that could sort plastic bottles by colour and polymer in 2006, and currently Managing Director of the world’s largest plastic bottle processing facility, ECO Plastics, Jonathan Short knows his way round plastic reprocessing.

A self-labelled ‘recycler’ for the past 20 years, Short has gone from working at his family’s skip and scrap metal business in Newcastle to building Europe’s largest plastics reprocessing facility in a relatively short time.

“When the landfill tax came in, in the mid 1990s, the skip-hire business invested in equipment that would sort skip waste into wood, rubble, soil, et cetera, and we were left with quite a bit of paper, cardboard and plastic”, he recalls. “I did some investigation into the markets for those materials and found they had quite a bit of value, but by the time they’d hit the transfer station they were too dirty, too mixed, and too labour-intensive to sort… I realised that for not a great deal of money you could actually put a bit of equipment into a packaging company that would allow you to recycle these materials.”

And so Alternative Waste Solutions (AWS) was born, a company that processed plastic, paper and cardboard and sent them to landfill ‘alternatives’, mainly in nascent Far East markets.

Today, heading up a workforce of 190, Short noticeably refrains from claiming he was a pioneer in seeing waste as a resource, pointing to the business case: “With the continuing increase in landfill tax, it was clear there was a very strong fiscal driver to move people away from simply sending waste to landfill and trying alternatives, cost-effective alternatives.”

Export of recyclate helped put AWS on the map, Short says: “The opening up of routes to markets in the Far East around 2003/04 allowed us to compete in the domestic market, particularly with plastics. We started to buy mixed plastic bottles, which was a fairly new product at the time – in 2003 there were only around 24,000 tonnes a year of bottles being collected (compared to 280,000 tonnes being collected at the moment) – and as there was no domestic reprocessing infrastructure at that time it had to go abroad.”

In 2006, AWS opened a bottle sorting plant on a converted WWII airfield in Hemswell, Lincolnshire. Short bought four machines that could sort plastic bottles by colour and polymer, one of the first times the technologies had been combined, he says (the plant now has 25 of these). Things took a turn for the worse on 25 August 2009, when the Hemswell facility caught fire and burned down. “We lost virtually all the factory”, Short sighs. But after reinvesting and rebuilding, opportunity came knocking when Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) approached AWS – now ECO Plastics – to partner in a venture processing plastic bottles. Together, they launched Continuum Recycling.

“It wasn’t great timing because we were just starting to rebuild after the fire, but it was one of those chances you can’t turn down. So, no sooner had we started up the new factory [in July 2010] than we needed to expand again. From the original threeacre site processing 100,000 tonnes, we increased to 150,000 tonnes and took on another 10 acres of land.” When Continuum officially opened its doors in 2012, ECO Plastics became the largest plant of its kind in the world.

“We would never have made the latest investment without the joint venture and 10-year supply agreement in place with Coca-Cola. When you’re making these multi-million pound investments, you need three things: the customers (or a long-term supply agreement), a good supply, and the technical knowhow of dealing with it.”

Despite his focus on improving the UK’s infrastructure for plastic reprocessing, Short stresses he is not against a global market for recyclate. “We’re often accused of being anti-export and we’re not, but we are anti-export of poor-quality recyclates.”

Short argues that despite industry concern regarding the Chinese government’s imposition of stricter recyclate import standards – Operation Green Fence – this approach is a good thing for the long-term health of the recycling industry: “China is still going to be a huge market for the Western world for plastic, but they’re going to move away from taking waste, they’re going to want a resource. The world isn’t going to fall apart – but everybody has to be now focused on quality, as good-quality materials and products will sell anywhere in the world.”

A key part in this will be ensuring “an even playing field” in the rigour of checks for material recycled in the UK and sent overseas. “The incentives that were put in place to encourage the infrastructure are now having the opposite effect. For example, if a supplier or trader were to put 20 tonnes of material into a container, he’ll get 20 tonnes worth of Packaging Export Recovery Notes (PERNs), but if I put the same 20 tonnes of material through my plant, I will be lucky if I can generate something like 60 per cent of the value of Packaging Recovery Notes (PRNs), due to the contamination. Now, when PRNs were £3 a tonne it didn’t make any difference; when they’re £50 or £60 a tonne, as they are today, it becomes material. And if they go to £100 a tonne or above, it becomes damaging, as there is an export market out there that will take rubbish in the waste.”

Short suggests having material exporters demonstrate the same audit trail detail as domestic reprocessors: “When we claim a PRN as a domestic reprocessor we’ve got to provide rigorous audit trails, et cetera, for the year losses that are experienced through our process.” Currently, a domestic re-processor has to demonstrate that process losses are no more than 25 per cent or he cannot claim a PRN. “The exporter”, Short says, “should be required to provide proof from his customer that the process losses have been less than 25 per cent of the consignment; without the proof the PERN is worth only 75 per cent of the PRN.”

Policing export quality is another area that needs to be tackled, Short says, citing the Environment Agency’s (EA) lack of resources as a major factor in its inability to credibly manage the sheer number of containers leaving the country. But he points to the amended Transfrontier of Shipment of Waste Regulations (TFS) as a source of hope: “I can sympathise with the EA – there’s hundreds of thousands of containers of waste (or resource) being exported… but as all our documentation for export now goes to the shipping companies online, you don’t have to have a guy going around physically looking at containers to understand if a mix polymer is going to a country illegally, you just need to look at the bill of lading. Short of that bill being fraudulent, which wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility, an awful lot of work could be done in front of a computer screen. So, one proposal in the regulation consultation is about moving some of the responsibilities away from the EA to HMRC, for example.”

Indeed, under the proposed Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) Code of Practice (CoP), the EA will need to have all its resources at hand to police these facilities – currently around 108 – to ensure they are in compliance with the regulations. A key factor, says Short, will be stringent sampling: “At ECO Plastics, we have over 4,500 data points that we monitor a day. Because we’re sending something out there that will go for direct food contact, we are subject to stringent audit criteria. So you’ve got to have all those quality checks in place and it’s very, very important to have that further down the supply chain.

“When the industry’s in a tough financial place, people don’t want to spend money on sampling, but actually if you spend that money, you’re able to demonstrate a better quality material, and you’ll get that investment back many times over… I would love to pay more to my suppliers for a better quality material.”

But industry is coming round to the fact that things need to change, Short says, with the responses to the MRF CoP showing a level of unity across different bodies: “The MRF Code of Practice needs to be mandatory and I think all parties are agreed that it needs to be so. When you read the responses from different sides of the fence, be it ESA or the Resource Association, there’s a coming together of minds, a general realisation that things do need to change. Even six months ago, we seemed to be poles apart; now we’re getting closer together.”

Despite the steady industry progression towards treating waste as a resource, at times there does seem to be a lack of concert regarding what infrastructure can handle: “Unfortunately, two or three years ago WRAP had a drive to increase mixed plastics collections, but they didn’t fully understand the impact that was going to have on the plastic reprocessing sector.

“Millions of pounds of investment went into the collection and processing of plastic bottles, but not rigid plastics or black plastic, which we then started to receive [black plastic comprises about six to seven per cent of ECO Plastics’s input]. At a time when we’re still sending 55 per cent of plastic bottles to landfill, surely the first opportunity is to encourage more plastic bottles into the stream.”

Short adds that with 600,000 tonnes of plastic bottles used in the UK every year, and only 280,000 tonnes of those being collected, councils should be taking advantage of the fact that 90 per cent of households (where 80 per cent of plastic bottles are consumed) have a plastics collection facility, by employing “clear, effective communication strategies”.

Indeed, Short says that councils could make a further £70 million if they encourage more people to recycle their plastic bottles: “What we’re seeing coming through the plastic basket is probably 60 per cent bottle content – it was 80 per cent bottle content five years ago. If councils just encourage consumers to put plastic bottles in their recycling bin and get that extra 320,000 tonnes, councils would save on landfill tax and would get money from reprocessors too. I’d currently pay £160 a tonne for a pure plastic bottle stream – that is twice our current average price, which is reduced to take account of the non-plastic as well as the
non-recyclable rigid plastic contamination.”

Earlier this year, Continuum Recycling celebrated having sorted a quarter of a billion bottles just nine months after the £15-million facility opened, and it is now responsible for processing more than 50 per cent of the UK’s bottle-grade recycled PET plastic. What is needed now, Short says, is investment.

“When you look at the collections, there’s around 400,000 tonnes of plastic being collected now, and that is going to turn into 800,000 tonnes in the next five years. There’s currently only one facility in the UK that takes raw material in and sends a foodgrade product out, and that’s us. “Once the brand owners know and feel secure in the fact that the supply is there, and it will be there this year, next year and the year after that, I’m sure investment will come rolling in."