A New Polypropylene Recycling Plant in UK To Get Underway

The packaging and engineered products company, Berry Global Inc. has shed light on its plan to start building a Polypropylene (PP) recycling plant at Leamington, United Kingdom in September. The facility will be dedicated to the production of food-grade materials with a set purity of 99.9%. The new facility will be located in a 13000 square meter area planted with trees to compensate for the CO2 emissions. 

Berry Global has a history of creating solutions towards the circular economy. Berry’s proprietary technology, CleanStream enables mechanical processing of PP generated from household wastes to recycled packaging materials. The technology applies a programmable sorting method, in integration with online sensing technologies and machine learning algorithms that allow efficient separation of PP-based household wastes. The CleanStream technology offers huge advantages over the virgin PP production process owing to its 80% low carbon footprint, 90% reduction in the use of fossil fuels, 50% less water consumption and 60% less acidification.

Polypropylene is a low-density and lightweight thermoplastic polymer that finds extensive usage in end-user sectors of automotive, packaging, home appliances, electronics and medical equipment. Its abundant use in industrial and household commodities have increased the after-use dumping of these materials into manifolds that in turn is causing harsh effects on the environment. Recycling Polypropylene from wastes is garnering interest and investments from many start-ups and petroleum sector companies these days. As per ChemAnalyst, the global demand for Polypropylene is going to grow at a healthy CAGR of over 3% with China and India being its major drivers owing to the high usage of PP in the packaging and automobile sector in these countries. Hence, the development of the methodologies that could transform Polypropylene into a circular product holds huge potential in the coming future and will be gaining a lot of support from environmentalists.