March 20th 2024, The Midland Packaging Society visited Berry Circular Polymers in Leamington Spa. This was one of our most well attended events, joined by fifteen visitors from leading brands, label manufacturing and academia. We were fortunate enough to be introduced to a processing facility that recovers and separates food grade polymer packaging recyclates from kerbside collected PP. Mechanically processing domestically recovered household polypropylene back into contact-sensitive applications such as cosmetics and personal care packaging.
We were introduced to Jamie Riley, Divisional Sustainability Manager who acted as our guide and host during the visit and he effortlessly and enthusiastically explained the various processes involved and answered questions as we walked around the site.
Nothing quite prepares you for the vastness of the Berry complex that opened in April of 2023. The inflow of bales of ready sorted PP are subjected to a variety of further re-sorting processes that involve AI assisted vision systems that operate at high speed to refine the waste into a selection of material suitable for introduction to a food grade processing stream and those that are unsuitable and are destined for non-hygienic applications.
As you would expect the machinery involved is complex and colossal, including the washing and wet sortation of heavy and lighter materials. These substrates then undergo a cleansing process that removes both ink, residual adhesives and paper fibres from in-mould labelling, resulting in a refined product that consists of tiny flakes of clean, clear, and opaque PP. Subsequent cleansing in air tanks is then applied where blown warm clean air removes any remaining odours.
These flakes are then heated and turned into a pristine pellet size feedstock for re-manufacture, thereby providing a fully circular recovery of material that can be used in the manufacture of trays, pots and containers that are capable of further re-processing again as they themselves re-enter the system from future successive kerbside collections.
Report by Jeremy Plimmer
