Pipe scrap winds up as trash bags

Europe's market leader in household disposables, CeDo, plans to take off-cuts and unused pipe scrap from pipe processor Radius Systems and incorporate this scrap into CeDo's EcoMin range of trash bags. These bags already are processed from agricultural film scrap; new and novel is the addition of construction scrap.

CeDo's David Brookes holds a roll of the company's EcoMin trash bags, which now include scrap pipe from the construction sector.

CeDo claims its EcoMin household trash bags already are a best seller in the supermarket own label category. The name will be changed slightly to EcoMin II to recognize the addition of polyethylene scrap from pipe. David Brookes, group technology manager at the processor, notes, "Being able to go to a range of first-use industries for plastics to recycle into disposable film gives us many more marketing and technical options."

CeDo currently supplies some 22,000 tonnes of recycled household disposable items into the UK retail sector, and expects that soon about 30% of this tonnage will incorporate waste plastics from the UK's construction sector.

Radius's waste pipe collection and recycling efforts—which it calls SuperScheme —has already won a number of awards and recognition, with it using most of the material collected for its own extrusion of non-pressure pipe. The EcoMin recipe typically includes 60% post-consumer recyclate (PCR), 30% calcium carbonate compound and up to 10% of virgin polyethylene. The bulk of CeDo's PCR is sourced from its own recycling plant in Geleen, The Netherlands, which recycles  some 40,000 tonnes of agricultural silage wrap annually.
 
The processor reckons that, by using PCR material, the carbon footprint of a EcoMin bag is only about 40% as high as that of an equivalent one made from virgin plastics. The use of pipe recyclate is expected to reduce this footprint even further. —Matt Defosse