Climate Action North makes an impact with plastic waste
Climate Action North is supercharging its work in reducing litter and waste by joining up with local company Impact Recycling to address how plastics collected from their projects can be recycled.
Working with Wallsend-based company Impact Recycling, the aim is to close the recycling gap and offer circular economy solutions by recycling the plastic waste collected from the various Climate Action North projects including the latest award-winning initiative North East Action for Rivers (NE4R).
David Mahoney, COO of Impact Recycling said: “We’re delighted to be working with Sharon and her team to address the plastics recycling issue and working with our own waste streams to address the problem of recycling tree guards is the perfect partnership climate solution for their projects.
“Through our working process and waste streams management we are able to separate the “hard to recycle” stream of mixed rigid waste plastics by amplifying differences in the densities between the polymer types and thereby creating a purified product which can be compounded and repurposed into alternative products such as coat hangers, pallets, pipes, and furniture.
“This technology is something we’ve worked really hard to develop sustainably as a solution for the single use plastics and hard plastics market enabling us to recycle even the most difficult mixed plastic waste streams.”
Above left to right: waste material and compounded recycled polypropylene and polypropylene ready for the next stage in processing use of plastics manufacturers.
Sharon Lashley, Managing Director at Climate Action North said: “Being introduced to David and his innovative product is an amazing breakthrough for us especially as we are constantly collecting large quantities of plastic during our beach cleans and river clean ups.
”Being able to channel this waste stream through Impact Recycling will mean that we can be confident the plastic collected from our projects can be treated using BOSS technology and can re-enter the circular economy system to be recycled into a multitude of products, not only reducing the single use plastics issue but also closing the plastics recycling gap.
“We’re also very impressed with the sustainability commitments of Impact Recycling and their attention to detail including the life cycle analysis and their End of Waste (EoW) accreditation status.”
The companies plan to work together in the coming months on their climate solutions and waste project and, as well as taking the waste collected from the WATAR project, Climate Action North will also be trialling the recycling of redundant tree guards which once removed from trees on their projects will be sent to Impact Recycling for recycling.
David said: “Typically, tree guards tend to be made from polypropylene and can be hard to separate and recycle using traditional standard methods. Using our processing technology we can separate the polyolefin content from the mixed stream then, utilising our Innovative BOSS technology, separate into constituent content of polypropylene and polyethylene to purities of 98 percent and above which can then be re-introduced into the circular economy marketplace.”
Sharon Lashley said: “We’re very excited about taking this joint project forward with David and his team and looking forward to the of how we can recycle the waste we collect from our litter awareness projects – of course we will also be continuing our work with communities in raising awareness about single use plastics and ocean pollution, all with the aim to reduce the amount of waste we produce in the first place.
“If we can do this, and also have a really good quality recycling process in place, reducing our reliance on new plastic products will certainly help overall consumption levels – for Climate Action North this is a perfect climate solution!”
The time for talking is over, today we need to act.