Case Studies: Wastecare

White goods' polystyrene packaging now recycled thanks to Greenbank machine

The company contracted by a major high street department store to manage the collection and recycling of its customers' unwanted white goods and the polystyrene packaging of its new items is saving hundreds of pounds a week after installing a Greenbank compactor.

Wastecare, one of the UK's largest independent collection and recycling company specialising within the hazardous and difficult waste streams sector, was asked by the retailer's management company MML if, as well as collecting all their customers' unwanted white goods - the ones exchanged when they bought new ones and which need disposing of correctly - they could find a better way of dealing with the polystyrene packaging than sending it to landfill as their stores had been doing.

The client passed on its own compactor to Wastecare but, when that was destroyed in a fire, the company took the opportunity to buy a superior system for its main site in Halifax, West Yorkshire.

Greenbank was chosen as its preferred supplier after it actively drew up a solution for Wastecare by custom-building a conveyor fed compactor especially for them.

This compacts 370kg of polystyrene into a pallet, as opposed to the 250kg pallets of its predecessor, which is then sold on to a processor for recycling.

John Wilcox, Wastecare's Contract Implementation Manager, said the impact, both financially and environmentally, had been huge.

"A vehicle taking just polystyrene to landfill would cost up to £300 a trip and it would take ten trips, if all the polystyrene was in the same place, to dispose of the total weekly volume of waste from all of our client's stores. Now we are avoiding landfill and are saving a considerable amount of money each week!" John explained. In addition, the sale of the compacted pallets offsets half Wastecare's costs of manpower to process and load them up.

The Greenbank machine - a Cobalt SC 3000 - is also twice as fast as the previous one, enabling Wastecare to keep on top of the amount of polystyrene collected from stores all over the country. Previously, it could only deal with half of it, which meant always having a backlog in waste skips at the stores. The speed and capabilities of the new system mean that the individual department store sites are much tidier and their skips do not need emptying as frequently, thus further reducing the company's carbon footprint.

Having seen the success of its custom built Cobalt, Greenbank is now confident that a similar design could be employed by other companies needing to dispose of huge amounts of polystyrene.

Robin Evershed, Greenbank's Sales Director said "By talking to clients and understanding their needs, we can adapt an existing machine or custom build one to bring them similar benefits to those experienced by Wastecare. Their Cobalt is fast, labour efficient and compacts large amounts into saleable pallets, therefore reducing landfill and transportation costs while actually bringing in revenue. We are as delighted as they are at the results!"