The company says the Washington plant now processes 70 tonnes of post-consumer plastic packaging a day.
Plans for the plant were first announced in 2020, as part of an initial £7 million investment letsrecycle.com story).
Last year, Biffa announced plans to invest a further £13 million to increase the annual capacity of the plant by 14,000 tonnes to 39,000 tonnes (see letsrecycle.com story). However, this expansion will now instead take place at the Redcar plant.
Washington
Polypropylene plastic is first processed at Biffa’s sorting facilities across the UK before being taken to Washington, where it is cleaned and ground into flakes and sold to manufacturers across the UK and EU.
Other types of plastic, including milk and fizzy drinks bottles, which can be recycled back into food-grade plastic, are handled at Biffa’s other polymer plants in Redcar and Seaham, also in the north-east, which employ a total of over 300 people.
Since 2016, Biffa has invested more than £54.5 million in plastics recycling infrastructure and now recycles 155,000 tonnes of plastic each year, with plans to increase this to 240,000 tonnes by 2030.
Investment
Chris Hanlon, Biffa Polymers commercial director, said: “We’re on a mission to change the way people think about waste, and our new facility at Washington is the latest in a series of significant investments to build a ‘circular economy’, where materials are re-used, repaired, refurbished or recycled for as long as possible.
“It’s amazing to think that a shampoo bottle thrown away in Sunderland could be turned into part of a new garden chair in Gateshead.”
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