Waste firm Greenstar gears up for huge recycling push

Underlying Greenstar’s business model is a desire to “make it as easy as possible for people and businesses to recycle more and to recycle better”, according to chief executive Ian Wakelin. In tandem with this, government targets for at least 40% of household waste to be recycled and composted by this year have made the construction of new recycling facilities critical. The group is meeting this challenge with a massive investment in a new site in north London.

As Wakelin highlights, there is a “serious shortage” of materials recycling capacity in the area. But Greenstar’s Atlas site in Edmonton, which was due to open in late April, after this supplement went to press, will “go a long way to providing the recyclable processing and waste bulking requirements” of north London.

The scale of the project’s ambition and its capacity is certainly impressive (see factfile). But, according to Green-star recycling director Mick Davis, who is overseeing the development of Atlas, quality is just as important as quantity.

Build it and they will come
“It’s our obligation to get as much out of the materials as we can,” he says. “We have to recognise it’s not waste, it’s a commodity, and we make money from selling commodities.”

Greenstar, a £150m-turnover business with presence throughout the waste (or should that be commodity?) stream, including collection, recycling and reprocessing services, has taken a calculated risk in constructing the Atlas facility. Rather than following the traditional investment model of building a facility to operate an already secured contract, Greenstar has adopted a ‘build it and they will come’ approach.

So far this decision has paid off. The firm has already won a contract to recycle materials from the North London Waste Authority, the statutory waste disposal body for seven local authorities, including Camden, Hackney and Enfield. This will account for 50,000 to 60,000 tonnes per year, out of a total of 100,000 tonnes already committed to the Atlas site, although the facility has an annual capacity of 250,000 tonnes.

Davis says Atlas is likely to take 70% of its materials from local authorities and 30% from commercial waste streams, a greater proportion of commercial materials than found elsewhere in the country. The debate over co-mingled versus source-separated collections by local authorities shows no sign of ending and, while Davis admits there is “no secret” about Greenstar’s support for the co-mingled model, Atlas has been set up to accept both collection types.

Co-mingled conversion
He says Greenstar’s Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) at Aldridge in the West Midlands, the largest in the UK, has “disproved” concerns about the quality of materials recycled from co-mingled collections. “Because of the economies of collection and higher recycling rate, lots of authorities are converting to co-mingled,” he says.

The ultimate destination of the materials recycled at Atlas will depend on market dynamics. Although Davis says the group will try to “give preference to UK buyers” when possible, Atlas will receive regular visits from China’s quality inspection agency, the China Certification and Inspection Group (CCIC), which has already accredited Aldridge as ‘strategically important’. “The quality of materials we sell to them is no different from the quality sold to the UK or Europe,” says Davis. “There’s a naivety in the argument that says China will accept lower-grade commodities.”

Although China and India are important destinations for Greenstar’s materials, the group is also investing in UK reprocessing facilities. Greenstar WES, its plastics business, produced 5,900 tonnes of food-grade recycled HDPE plastic flake in 2009, and in February announced it had won a grant from Wrap that will help to fund a new facility in Redcar to reprocess 20,000 tonnes of mixed plastics per year.

Future investment will continue to be crucial, says Davis. “Local authorities are feeling huge cost pressures so we need to be as efficient as we can to make it [recycling] cost-effective for them,” he adds