Written by Jonny Williamson
Industry’s growing acceptance and adoption of more environmentally-friendly initiatives involve recycling waste rather than sending it for landfill, with the aim of reducing it completely. Local and national governments have drafted schedules and plans to try and achieve this ambitious aim, with the food industry seeming to be making the most progress to date.
With plans in place to charge businesses a landfill tax, such as the EU’s ‘Landfill Directive’, many have invested in alternative disposal solutions like anaerobic digestion plants to produce biomass. Others have simply began to use incinerators, a controversial move as burning is seen as only a slight improvement on using a landfill, with the process releasing a host of gases and particulates.
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The difficulty facing a great number of manufacturers is that their waste is characteristically made up of a mixture of materials, including plastics, metals and chemicals. Separating mixed waste streams has become easier through the use of magnets and optical or infrared sensors, and the amount of materials which can now be recycled has also increased. However, the diverse nature of there products has left many manufacturers still struggling to recycle every aspect of their waste streams.
A problem www.zwtl.net hopes to solve by creating a mutually beneficial network of waste producers and waste solution providers, regardless of scale. Becoming part of the network is free of charge, with the website matching up compatible businesses based on location, material type and quantity produced.
Frank Stevenson, Marketing Director, said:
“One of the most difficult things many companies find is when a waste stream they produce is not made from a single material but is combined with several different materials. In many of these cases, the individual materials are perfectly able to be recycled but it is a matter of finding someone that can split them and deal with each separately. What we hope to offer is a one-stop shop for companies looking to eliminate waste issues.”
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