Welsh project converts coffee cups and chip packets into building materials and decking

16 Mar 2022 --- As part of a supply chain project, WRAP Cymru (Wales) has taken hard to recycle items and converted them into new items, including turning single-use coffee cups into waterproof building materials and decking. The project is funded by the Welsh Government.

The two-year trial brought together several companies, including recycling pioneer Nextek and UK composite decking manufacturer Ecodek. 

The companies created the “world’s first” composite decking made from single-use coffee cups combined with metallized films, such as those used for chip packets. 

Ecodek’s new 100% recycled decking can turn 200 coffee cups into a square meter of new decking, which means the project has the potential to recycle a “substantial” part of the post-consumer single-use plastic coffee cups that currently go to landfill or incineration, says the company.

Single-use extinction experiments
The trial is one of four projects that took difficult to recycle waste items and reprocessed them into brand new products with an existing end market. 

The project is aiming to change the way single-use plastic is currently used and disposed of by creating economically viable and environmentally beneficial materials. This aligns with UK Plastics Pact targets and helps develop end markets for difficult to recycle materials.

The composite material also incorporates metallized film waste from chip packets and similar household packaging, and can be used for both exterior decking and hardwearing building applications. 

Ecodek’s new 100% recycled decking can turn 200 coffee cups into a square meter of new decking.Making use of waste items in this way means the material is more environmentally sustainable and can be made to perform equally well to less sustainable options, WRAP claims.

The resulting material has the potential to be used for several product applications, and is also structurally strong enough for a variety of building applications on a large scale. 

Takeback schemes 
Furthermore, to ensure the circularity of its new products, Ecodek offers a takeback scheme to ensure products are recycled into new items at the end of their life.

WRAP says there is a lot of potential to utilize used, single-use coffee cups, with 3.2 billion fiber-composite cups placed onto the UK market in 2019, and half a million single-use coffee cups disposed of daily in the UK – only 0.25% of which are recycled.

The recycled material was also used to build a picnic bench which has now been delivered to Coleg Cambria in Deeside, North Wales. 

A second project, which worked with Frontier Plastics, part of the Vernacare Group, at their site in South Wales, was a trial which involved the manufacture of medical sharps containers and inner safety shields from 100% recycled polypropylene (rPP). 

They also incorporated rPP into the manufacture of indoor food waste and compost caddy manufactured by the Welsh brand Addis Housewares.

The two items focussed on were a range of black sharps containers and then inner safety shields for yellow Sharpsafe containers, used for medical sharps waste such as syringes. The new yellow Sharpesafe range of containers that have been produced through this project will be rolled out across many parts of the NHS. 

Making use of waste items means the material is more environmentally sustainable and can be made to perform equally to less sustainable options, WRAP claims.Agricultural waste
Industry standards have also been updated to recognize and encourage the incorporation of recycled content into the containers, as previously there was no mention of recycled content being allowed. This was a complex project that needed to overcome an initial lack of market confidence in the proposition of recycled PP. 

In time it was able to show the reliability and diversity of the material, with each product manufactured to a different specification for performance and physical characteristics.

A third project has examined how to recycle common agricultural waste plastics into new products. The aim of this program is to drive demand for recycled agricultural plastic and contribute to the Welsh circular economy, and utilize this common waste stream across the nation’s farms. 

The project demonstrated how effective the pre-washing process of agricultural plastic is and meant a higher quantity of products could be recycled. However, more work is required, the companies say.

A fourth project has created mortar tubs for the construction sector from recycled plastic. In a collaboration between Corilla Plastics, Green Edge Applications and Cardiff University, the team identified over 700 mortar tubs that were heading for landfill or incineration. 

Using QR codes and mobile phones, they managed to intercept this process to collect, recycle and manufacture them back into new mortar tubs. The project is intended to show the effectiveness and success of using recycled content in plastic tubs and encourages the construction sector to switch to using recycled plastic products. The results of this trial can be applied to any manufacturing process and can be used to support similar projects, not just in Wales but across the globe, says WRAP.

Edited

By Natalie Schwertheim