IPlas - Zyplex

Victory in University of Sheffield innovation award

2011-11-22T13:58:00.009Z

Annie-May Hugo, Technical Manager, Iplas

I’m the proud owner of a brand new Apple iPad thanks to the groundbreaking work I’m involved in at Iplas. It was the first prize in a partly serious, partly fun competition organised by the University of Sheffield. The challenge – to give a two-minute presentation, using just one slide, about an innovation project. Mine was about developing reliable and low maintenance railway sleepers.

I was one of seven representatives from companies taking part in the university’s Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. The pitches covered subjects ranging from radioactivity analysis to new heat exchangers.

More than 120 representatives of business and academia, in Yorkshire and beyond, attended the event and voted in the competition.

The audience were won over by the benefits of Zyplex – long life, high performance, low maintenance, and from UK recycled plastic. The audience were impressed with the extensive testing programme and the wide range of applications it has supported.

We make products from retaining walls to boardwalks to porous paving, for sectors as diverse as building and construction, marine and equestrian. And the great thing about working here is we are every bit as committed to continuing pushing the boundaries as when I arrived in 2008.

Innovation is at the heart of everything we do here and now I’ve got an iPad to prove it!

Do cuts in the Feed-in Tariffs scheme threaten the UK’s sustainable future?

2011-11-21T15:07:00.001Z

Howard Waghorn, Chief Operating Officer, Iplas

We’re concerned by the Government’s proposal to cut back the Feed-in Tariffs (FITs), a scheme they only introduced in April 2010 but which has already led to a significant increase in investment in low-carbon electricity projects.

Our concern is that the proposal flies in the face of the Government’s commitment to helping create a sustainable future for the UK - a quest in which we, as the manufacturers of Zyplex, a high performance plastic made from 100% recycled plastic which might otherwise go to landfill, are very much involved .

FITs are incentives to householders and businesses to generate electricity by having solar panels placed on locations such as roofs. The tariffs’ success is demonstrated by the fact that 16,000 schemes of this sort were installed during September alone, double the number in June, and that over 100,000 with a capacity of over 400MW have appeared since the incentives took effect in April 2010.
But now the Government – pre-empting its own consultation exercise – has announced huge cuts in the tariffs, with support for schemes up to 4kW being reduced from 43.3p/kWh to 21p/kWh, for example. The reductions will affect all projects with an eligibility date on or after December 12.

Industry insiders have predicted cuts on this scale will leave the solar panel sector devastated, with up to 25,000 jobs being lost. Some have also argued that this would make the changes financially counter-productive since savings from reduced tariffs will be more than balanced by benefit payments and lost tax revenues.

Where likely uptake of the schemes following the changes is concerned, given that a typical solar PV system costs around £10,000, many people won’t be able to afford one from their savings and will now realise that borrowing at commercial rates will mean losing money on the deal. Also, the typical time occupiers stay in a home is eight years, whereas it will now take 14-18 years for householders to break even, in terms of savings and earnings, on an average 2.6kWp system. Finally, suppliers say that only with a tariff of 28p or more can they provide panels free to recipients such as pensioners and social housing schemes, enabling them to save about a third on their electricity bills.

A few days ago, we pointed out that more than 10,000 jobs could be created in the UK if the Government followed California’s lead and exploited the employment generating power of plastic recycling. You have to wonder now whether the Government is so preoccupied by immediate financial considerations that they’ve lost any concept of a longer-term, sustainable future.

How the UK government is missing the chance to create thousands of jobs, in plastics recycling

2011-11-11T14:50:00.015Z

Howard Waghorn, Chief Operating Officer, Iplas

More than 10,000 new jobs could be created in the UK if our Government followed California’s lead and exploited the job generating power of plastic recycling.

The American state has just implemented a law (Assembly Bill (AB) 1149) aimed at creating and supporting thousands of jobs at home by massively reducing the 200,000 tonnes of plastic bottles it exports annually for reprocessing, many to China. It’s one of the latest plastic recycling market development initiatives California has implemented in a series which began in 2000.

Mark Murray, executive director of the Californians against Waste pressure group estimates that the plastic market programme in California already supports more than 750 jobs but the state is collecting enough plastic to sustain four to five times that number. The new legislation should provide a massive step towards fulfilling that employment potential.

Applying a similar multiplier in the UK, we could generate 10,500 new jobs in UK plastics recycling, by taking similar steps.

According to a report by Friends of the Earth, carried out last year, recycling makes employment sense in the UK, creating 10 times more jobs per tonne than sending rubbish to landfill or incineration. That’s because recycling means jobs being generated in collection, sorting and reprocessing, in addition to the supply chain and wider industry.

Here at Iplas, at our base in Halifax, West Yorkshire, we have illustrated this point by growing from a standing start in 1999 to today employing 58 people making Zyplex – our high performance recycled plastic – and a range of high quality recycled plastic products including benches, fencing, decking and Zypave porous paving. It’s therefore obvious to us that encouraging recycling could play an important part in reviving the UK economy. Such initiatives are sorely needed, given that unemployment has recently reached a record high.

Estimates suggest the UK sends at least 760,000 tonnes of plastic rubbish abroad for recycling each year. Like California, we despatch much of this to China - the nation which drives the global reprocessing trade, importing more than eight million tonnes of waste plastic a year.

When we export this material to countries such as China, we’re also exporting jobs, which could just as easily exist here, if appropriate steps were taken to support them.

We collect millions of used bottles each year and ship them off to China, losing a valuable commodity. The Chinese then put their own people to work on them and add value by reprocessing them into things like clothes and accessories, which they sell back to us, at a profit. It just doesn’t make sense.
Exporting huge quantities of plastic waste to China is also potentially damaging environmentally, since the UK has no control over standards applied elsewhere. And a further effect of the mass-export of plastics to China is that local recycling initiatives here are being starved of materials.

The 2010 study by Friends of the Earth said 51,400 jobs would be created in the UK if 70 per cent of the waste collected by local councils was recycled here. The report said another 18,800 jobs would be created if commercial and industrial waste was recycled at the same time. It’s time our Government listened to the figures.

Sustainable manufacturing sector facing bottle problem

2011-11-09T17:57:00.006Z

Paul Harris, Sales and Marketing Director, Iplas Group

It’s alarming to think that, over the next five years, the supply of used plastic bottles might not be enough to meet the demands of organisations like Iplas, manufacturers of recycled plastic products. That’s the stark warning from RECOUP (Recycling of Used Plastics Ltd), the national charity for developing plastics recycling in the UK, in their recently published UK Household Plastics Packaging Collection Survey 2011.

We are, of course, among the organisations who reuse plastic bottles, as they’re one of the vital raw materials in Zyplex – our high performance recycled plastic, made from 100% UK waste which might otherwise go to landfill. Zyplex products used in sustainable construction and other sectors include decking, fencing, outdoor furniture and Zypave porous paving.

RECOUP acknowledges that much progress has been made during recent years in stimulating supply of the bottles to organisations like Iplas. It points out, for example, that in 2010:

nearly 22 million households in the UK benefited from a plastic bottle kerbside collection
48.5 per cent of plastic bottles were collected, 2.5 per cent up on the 2009 figure and more than 45 per cent higher than the level a decade earlier
the number of bring-collection points for bottles had more than trebled since 2000.

The organisation also said, however, that its data should “ring alarm bells for policy makers, as well as those organisations across the plastic supply, collection and recycling chain.”

This is not least because the rate in growth of plastic bottle collections is slowing. Amounts collected in recent years were 216,000 tonnes in 2008; 263,000 tonnes in 2009; and 281,000 tonnes in 2010.

So what’s to be done? There’s undoubtedly an argument for improving bring schemes, through local authorities providing more of them and paying proper attention to factors such as location, layout and equipment, all of which have been shown to improve recovery rates.<.p>

But there’s not much doubt that kerbside collections really hold the key to dramatically improving that 2.5 per cent figure. With the widest possible coverage and the right collection frequency, receptacles and vehicles, these can really make a difference. According to WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme), kerbside schemes yield at least four times as many plastic bottles as bring schemes, and collections from them cost less per tonne. This chimes with a survey of 1,000 shoppers conducted by food and grocery research specialists IGD earlier this year. That showed 37 per cent of shoppers would recycle more materials if councils collected these near their homes.

Hats off to the local authorities who are working hard to improve and extend their kerbside collections. Actions like these, allied to councils making collections more cost-effective, through efficient handling and baling, alongside maximising returns through effective communication campaigns, have to be the way forward.

Bottle tops going (tinted) green

2011-10-19T09:50:00.003+01:00

Howard Waghorn, Chief Operating Officer, Iplas

Good news from Robert Wiseman dairies. They have been thinking about the long term effect of bottle tops in the waste stream and have decided to remove colourant from their milk bottle caps to make them more recyclable: the new tinted caps also enable them to increase the level of recycled plastic in their bottles. This is a great example of a big company making commercial sense on recycling.

The dairy industry alone uses two billion plastic bottle tops a year in the UK. Add to that drinks bottles, pharmaceutical containers, deodorants, cleaning products - even your Pringle "pop" top and you have billions upon billions of caps each year which could be collected and reformed into something new.

So surely local authorities are making the most of this versatile recycled waste stream already?
There are 232 local authorities in the UK, most of whom collect bottles but not bottle tops. How can this be so, when all bottle reprocessing plants separate off the caps and send them to other recyclers? The sad fact is that if you look at local authority waste collections you would struggle to find two that operate in the same way.

Surely it's time for a single local authority waste strategy and a nationwide code on what we should and should not collect? A code which communicates the consistent message that plastic is a multi use, reusable raw material that is great in the hands of recyclers, but not very good in landfill. Here at Iplas, plastic bottle tops are one of the most important raw materials that we use to make into many different types of high quality recycled plastic products.

So well done Robert Wiseman: good recyclable materials getting into the hands of the recycling aware and well intentioned British public. Now it's over to the local authorities to get it back into the hands of the recyclers.

Reduction is not the only way

2011-10-04T11:27:00.005+01:00

Paul Harris, Sales and Marketing Director, Iplas Group

We have just had another week of attention-grabbing activity on waste from the politicians. Front page headlines have been trumpeting how the government is getting tough on plastic bags; how the Welsh government is introducing a tax for the said offending items, and how there's going to be a handout for local authorities to collect the bins once a week.

None of these are new stories and arguably they do little to really combat the "throw-away society" we have become. While it is essential that efforts are made to reduce unnecessary packaging and to encourage alternative solutions, we should be careful not to forget the other 2 R's in the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra.

Let's take plastic bags first. Like many families, I am sure, the plastic bags that we use to bring home our supermarket shopping are reused during the week as bin liners. Adding a plastic bag tax will not prevent plastic bags being sent to landfill, they will just be called bin liners instead.

Secondly, while the UK government invests in the "basic right" to have your bins collected weekly, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15118516, other European governments have taken a different approach.

They have invested in the infrastructure that allows the collection, sorting and resale of low value packaging products that are then turned into high value recycled building materials, at competitive prices. This in turn gives a boost to those countries' home economies, creating local employment.

To be truly environmentally responsible in the long term, the government should be encouraging product/packaging designers to research and design cradle to cradle products rather than pushing the problem further down the chain. We have something to learn from our European neighbours.

Sustainable Urban Drainage System

2011-09-01T10:15:00.005+01:00

Gavin Wray, Director of Specialist Sales, Iplas Group
In recent years irregular weather patterns have increasingly lead to widespread flooding and disruption. I’m sure we all remember the images of bridges being washed away and flooded houses last year and having travelled in a very wet Scotland last week, there were already several washed out roads.

Thames Water is planning to build a £3.5bn 'super sewer' to prevent overflow from the current Victorian system being diverted directly into the Thames. Some argue this is a sensible option – after all, just as widening a motorway should help congestion, building bigger drains should help the water problem in the same way – but will it?

Constructing a massive new deep tunnel system will be incredibly disruptive and costly and could, in a relatively short period of time, still be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of water passing through it. More than this, merely building a temporary solution does not address the root cause of this problem, which is primarily surface run-off of rain water.
In Chicago they have used a Sustainable Stormwater Management system where permeable construction materials have been used in place of concrete or tarmac to allow much of the rainwater to pass directly into the soil below, where it is held for far longer, before draining away naturally – by doing this, the drains are not overloaded.

These materials are used on parking areas, pathways and alleys along with other methods such as ‘green roofs’ which also retain water.

Much like our own SUDS (Sustainable Urban Drainage System) regulations, the Chicago method seeks to provide a far more basic and natural solution to this problem and is also enforceable by law on new builds, where builders must either store rain water or substantially increase the permeability of the site.

Our Ground Reinforcement Block (GRB) is a product similar to those being used in Chicago and is increasingly being taken to solve this type of problem. With stronger legal requirements in this country, digging a ‘big hole’ and hoping the whole thing will be OK, would not be needed and with FIVE London Boroughs agreeing with this alternative solution, perhaps Thames Water should look at changing how they approach things before they invest in a bigger version of an already failed system.

What a waste!

2011-06-20T10:42:00.003+01:00

Howard Waghorn, Chief Operating Officer, Iplas

Having worked in the plastics industry for many years, I have often wondered why plastic is viewed in such a negative way. Our highways agency are known as ‘plastic policemen’, ‘plastic people’ are phoney and disingenuous, and cars are rejected because of a ‘plasticy’ dashboard. So where did our extreme negativity towards plastics come from? Answer: the usual source of intolerance, anger and bigotry - a lack of understanding.

We often hear that plastics take ‘thousands of years to break down in landfill’. To solve this challenging problem you would have to ask an innocent five year old who would say: ‘Don’t put it in landfill then’.

A brilliant and simple solution! Why didn’t we realise that burying a reusable, versatile, critical raw material in the earth was not as good as reusing it and making it into something new that can be recycled again and again?

The fact is that plastic is an amazing material. It can be moulded into thousands of different and useful products and then, when we don’t want them anymore, it can be melted down and moulded again......and again, and again, and again.

It’s strong and water resistant; it can be flexible, rigid, soft, hard, coloured, textured or smooth. It clothes us, transports us, gives us shelter, and packages our food and drink. It is probably one of man’s greatest innovations.

Nevertheless, in Yorkshire alone, we put 90,000 tonnes of rigid plastic into landfill in 2007.
So why do we bury it in the earth? Shall we ask that five year old?

Oh no...I forgot to put the bins out!

2011-06-20T08:39:00.008+01:00

Paul Harris, Sales and Marketing Director, Iplas

We seem to have developed an unhealthy interest in our (and other people’s) bins in Britain, to rival our weather obsession. We all like to regale people from other local authority areas with stories of how many bins/boxes/containers we have and how infrequently we see the bin men.

Forgot To Put The Bins Out Video (Armstrong and Miller)

The larger party in the coalition made an election promise to empty bins once a week. There was an army of people this week, on both sides of the debate, either outraged that their waste isn’t being picked up as soon as they create it or incredulous that people don’t want to separate their waste into several hundred different streams that only need collection once a decade.

What seems to be missing from the debate, however, is reliable information about what happens once the waste has been collected. People seem to think they have ‘done their bit’ for recycling once the waste has been put out. In fact this is just the beginning of the process. Since joining Iplas I have found myself explaining to friends and family that the new company I work for is involved in recycled materials. What has struck me is their general lack of understanding of what ‘recycling’ actually means.

Many of us were first exposed to recycling when the milkman replaced our empty bottles with new full ones, and there is a popular misunderstanding that the plastic milk bottle or glass sauce jar you throw away (in the green or blue bin!) will one day return to your table as a new full one.

What’s less commonly known are some of the surprising places where your discarded packaging may reappear. That glass sauce bottle may turn up as aggregate in the concrete of your new office building or as a filter in the local water treatment plant; your old car tyres may find their way onto your roof as a replacement for slate tiles and that bench you sat on in the park today may have once been your ‘lasagne for one’ packaging. What all of these applications have in common is not just that they are ‘green’, but that they have technical and economic advantages over products made from more traditional alternatives.

At Iplas we are working on some surprising applications for the mixed plastic waste streams we use as our raw materials: railway sleepers, structural components for the construction industry and many more that I will keep you updated on in this blog in the coming weeks.

Recycling - getting the balance right

2011-06-20T08:35:00.003+01:00

Grahame Hall, Chief Executive, Iplas

The Oxford English Dictionary defines recycling as ‘The processing of used material into new products’. It might therefore surprise you to know that over 80% of the plastics collected for ‘recycling’ in the UK are simply sorted by type, ground into small pieces, loaded into containers and sent to China or India where they are made into new products. So although, technically, they have been ‘recycled’, this process has taken place over two continents and 12,000 miles. Does this make any sense?

It certainly helps fuel UK PLC’s export drive and plays its part in reducing the trade deficit. Some would argue that it also reduces the amount of material going to landfill in the UK. But surely the whole purpose, and benefit, of recycling is to sort and use our own waste, not sell it to someone else to deal with?

The problem is not lack of investment. Not a week goes by without another multi million pound deal being announced in the plastics recycling sector: hard evidence of significant activity at the processing end of the spectrum. It’s the focus of this investment that troubles us.

Instead of simply concentrating on the processing of used materials with investments in wash plants, sorters, float/sink tanks etc, we should be focusing on the creation of new products and applications. On that subject the news flow gets very thin.

At Iplas we believe that it is high time for a more balanced approach to recycling. We need more investors and entrepreneurs to focus on making new products out of all types of recycled waste, including plastic, rather than focusing on processing and sorting.

We’re not talking here about low-grade junk type products but properly engineered materials that are not only fit for purpose but better than the products they replace. There are plenty of opportunities: we get enquiries about new products and applications almost every day. It’s just a question of getting the balance right.

Welcome to our blog

2011-06-20T08:27:00.003+01:00

Grahame Hall, Chief Executive, Iplas

Welcome to the Iplas blog which we have launched to mark the start of a new phase in our development. As the UK’s leading manufacturer of high performance recycled plastic products, we have a responsibility to contribute to the debate about the key issues surrounding the recycling of plastic.

We relish this opportunity and will be posting comments on a range of topical issues to move the debate in a positive direction. In particular, we want to highlight the performance advantages that recycled plastic products made from Zyplex have over traditional materials and how they are rapidly becoming the sustainable building products of choice for the construction industry.

We'd like to hear what you think too so please contribute your views by posting a comment.