Under a seven-year agreement, Owen-Illinois Inc will buy treated cullet from Viridor’s new advanced glass recycling plant in Newhouse, North Lanarkshire. And, O-I will close its own cullet sorting plant with the input glass container materials going in the future to the Viridor facility.
The transfer of operations means a significant increase in input for Viridor with the company taking in glass from 27 of the 32 councils in Scotland as well as from other sources.
The Newhouse facility, which opened this week, is capable of handling 200,000 tonnes of glass and is to initially process material from 17 Scottish local authorities (see letsrecycle.com story).
As one of the world’s largest glass packaging manufacturers, O-I produces millions of whisky and beverage bottles for Scotland’s burgeoning drinks industry each year.
The bottles are manufactured at O-I’s Alloa facility in Clackmannanshire, which will use recycled content from the Viridor plant in its production, including clear glass bottles.
In 2014, the global firm invested 30 million euros (£22 million) in the manufacturing plant, which included £3.9 million from Scottish Enterprise under its Regional Selective Assistance grant.
Kelliebank
O-I also conducts its own glass recycling collections directly from local authorities in Scotland and until now has processed the material at its adjoining cullet treatment facility, the Kelliebank Glass Recycling Centre.
With the Viridor contract in place, O-I confirmed that the Kelliebank site is due to enter a ‘transition period over a number of months’ to become a ‘logistics platform for local authority cullet’.
The Kelliebank plant will remain open for councils contracted to O-I who wish to deliver to Alloa rather than Newhouse – however the cullet will now be processed at the Viridor facility.
A total of 12 contract employees that maintain Kelliebank will also lose their jobs in the move, though O-I said it was cooperating with the workers’ employer to help them find alternative employment.
Welcoming the deal, Rens de Haan, country group leader for O-I in the UK and Netherlands, said the partnership with Viridor would improve the quality and quantity of glass cullet supplied via the latest technology in optical sorting and contaminant removal.
Quality
He said: “This partnership will improve the quality and quantity of cullet supplied to O-I’s Alloa plant, enabling us to increase the recycled content of glass packaging produced there, especially in clear glass bottles.
“This will also contribute further to our sustainability efforts. We expect the Newhouse plant to supply all the cullet we can use for the foreseeable future.”
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