Closing the loop for the milk industry

Challenge

All plastics take a great deal of energy and resources to produce and if not recycled, can add to the 8 million tonnes of plastics that is dumped into our oceans every year, as well as generating a significant amount of carbon emissions. The work we undertake at our Dagenham facility is helping to create a more sustainable future for plastics, by turning milk bottles back into milk bottles. Veolia controls the plastic recycling process from start to finish, closing the loop.

Firstly, we collect plastics from households and companies all around the UK. In our sorting centres, all this feedstock is then carefully sorted using a combination of expertise and cutting edge technology. This operation allows us to separate the different types of plastics including HDPE, PET and PP, but also milk food grade bottles from non-food bottles. At the Dagenham facility, incoming HDPE plastics are flaked and washed, then processed into high quality food-grade pellets that can be sold on to produce huge quantities of new milk bottles.

Veolia's solution

The state-of-the-art high density polyethylene plastic (HDPE) facility uses world-leading recycling technology to process and recover the highest food grade HDPE products, with a particular focus on the most everyday of items. The solution we have provided for milk bottles creates a circular solution for the dairy industry on a huge scale. By controlling the full process, Veolia can guarantee customers the supply of high quality polymers will never be under threat.

With this closed loop process, customers can access the materials they have put on the market and benefit from full traceability and transparency. In addition, the materials produced at this facility support customers to achieve their sustainability goals. Customers have included converters as well as major dairy producers such as Müller and Logoplaste (for Arla).

Specific Benefits

• Entire value chain
  Veolia and its partners work from collection to transformation and promote a robust, sustainable and traceable end of life of products.
   
• Local loop
  Cradle to cradle system that directly transform waste into the same product, and this for several life cycles.