Recovery position01 June 2006

Despite the government's delays over implementation of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, organisations must start to consider and implement solutions for disposing of this type of equipment.

In response to this, a state-of-the-art recycling plant for waste electrical equipment was opened in February in Billingham, near Middlesbrough. Logistics specialist Wincanton has ploughed £4.5m into the facility, which is the first such facility in this country.

The Billingham plant can process up to 75,000 tonnes of equipment each year - equivalent to 826,500 washing machines or 67 million kettles, for example. It takes waste items back to the basic component material that can be recycled, in line with the requirements of the WEEE Directive.

Billingham was a natural choice for the plant, since Wincanton already operates a similar recycling facility there for fridges - this came into Wincanton's ownership when the company bought P&O's logistics operations three years ago.

The machinery used at the Billingham plant is based around the MeWa machine, built in Germany and the first of its kind to be used for this type of recycling. It can process a diverse range of items, from kettles and mobile phones, to televisions and computers.

The process works as follows: first, waste equipment is fed into the machine (shown as point 1 on the diagram, right). The items are conveyed to the QZ cross-cut grinder, where the internal components, such as circuit boards, batteries and capacitors, are released by creating a vortex (point 2). The QZ technology uses chains to break up the materials, rather than conventional shearing techniques. This means that goods fed into the machine are 'cracked' open - the outer casing is broken, similar to the action of cracking a nut. The internal components can then be sorted and recycled. They are separated (point 3) mechanically, by size and type.

Recoverable components under WEEE include:
- ferrous metal
- non-ferrous metal (usually aluminium, copper and stainless steel)
- plastics
- printed circuit boards
- batteries
- capacitors
- liquid crystal displays
- cathode ray tubes
- mercury switches.

The components then pass through manual picking lines (point 4) to remove hazardous or particularly high-value products for recovery. To undertake all the separation manually would be very expensive, not to mention time consuming, but the facility uses a combination of mechanical and manual separation for optimum results.

Next, the remaining materials - predominantly ferrous metal, non-ferrous metal and plastics - undergo further mechanical separation and granulation (point 5). The granules are passed through a magnetic process to separate the ferrous and non-ferrous material, before the nonferrous is split further into metals (such as aluminium) and plastics.

The output (point 6) is then sold on to secondary markets, so moving the products up the waste hierarchy.

The plant has been running successfully, though obviously not to capacity, since its opening earlier this year. Now, to improve efficiency and productivity, the plant is working on a batch system. "We are looking to feed batches of similar categories of WEEE into the machine," says Simon Hill, the plant's commercial manager. "The benefits of this approach are two-fold. First, recycling similar types of plastic materials together gives better quality output at the other end. Also, the PCBs in personal computers, for example, have a higher value than those contained in televisions, so it makes sense to separate them from the outset, where possible."

What's more, he points out, once the legislation is finally implemented, some of the WEEE equipment will be coming from civic amenity collection sites and this may be of poorer quality. "There may be vacuum cleaners, which are still full of dust and dirt, for example," he explains, so recycling in batches will protect the quality of recoverable components and materials.

The government's delay in implementing the WEEE Directive into UK law is clearly a problem for Wincanton, which has invested huge sums in this facility. The likely implementation date has already been delayed on a number of occasions and a consenus of industry experts say that July 2007 is now looking the most likely date, though there has been no official confirmation of this to date by the Department of Trade and Industry.

In the meantime, therefore, Wincanton has gambled on this machine to put it at the head of the field, once the regulations are in place.

CEO Graham McFaull said at the plant opening in February: "We decided back in 2004 to make a significant capital investment in technology for a WEEE solution. Yes, we are frustrated that [the legislation] has been delayed a couple of times, but the fact remains that it's still a significant opportunity for Wincanton.

"This is good for our customers, good for the environment and it's good for the business."

More information
Email: recycling@wincanton.co.uk
Website: www.wincanton.co.uk


The recycling process:
1. Waste equipment is fed into the machine
2. QZ technology uses chains to break up the materials, rather than conventional shearing techniques
3. Internal components are sorted and recycled. They are separated mechanically, by size and type
4. The components pass through manual picking lines to remove hazardous or high-value products for recovery
5. The remaining materials undergo further mechanical separation and granulation
6. The output is sold on to secondary markets, so moving the products up the waste hierarchy.

SOE

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