The firm behind a £331m investment in two recycling and renewable energy centres opened in Scotland this year is considering another major investment to develop a plastics reprocessing facility.
Pennon, which this month officially opened a £154 million waste recycling and renewable energy centre at Polmadie, Glasgow under its Viridor arm, today said it was looking at the potential to build a facility to deal with waste plastics at its site in Dunbar.
In February it opened a £177 million waste-to-energy plant there next to its existing waste treatment hub in East Lothian. Viridor is already building a £65 million plastics reprocessing site at a facility at Avonmouth which will recycle plastics from bottles and pots, tubs and trays.
“We see plastics reprocessing as an exciting area of growth and see opportunities to increase our market share in this area,” said Pennon in a trading update today.
Earlier this year Viridor cited the ‘Blue Planet effect’ as fuelling interest in recycled plastics and said there was a clear ambition from both UK consumers and politicians to improve recycling rates and reduce the amount of waste which is sent to export.
Viridor’s Polmadie site is the first of its kind in Scotland and will be operated by Viridor on behalf of Scotland’s largest local authority. Using state-of-the-art technology, more than 200,000 tonnes of the city’s waste will be diverted from landfill every year and used to generate enough electricity to power more than 26,000 homes.
The project will be delivered through a 25-year partnership between Viridor and the city council. It will divert 300,000 tonnes of post-recycling ‘residual waste’ from landfill and contribute to Scottish energy security.
The Dunbar site is generating base-load renewable energy supplied direct to the National Grid – the equivalent of 39 wind turbines – enough to continuously power over 70,000 homes.
