J&B News & Updates

16.10.24 | Press Releases

J&B Recycling is proud to announce its continued involvement in the Flexible Plastic Fund’s (FPF) FlexCollect recycling initiative for flexible plastic packaging with Newcastle City Council, which is set to expand to 35,000 homes in October 2024. FPF FlexCollect is a UK-wide pilot project designed to tackle the challenge of recycling flexible plastic packaging - materials like plastic bags, wrappers, and film, which are often difficult to collect and recycle through traditional methods.

Since June 2023, 7,000 Newcastle homes have been taking part in this innovative scheme, with residents receiving special blue survival bags to put their flexible plastic packaging into. These bags are then collected by Newcastle City Council alongside the rest of their regular comingled recycling and processed by J&B Recycling, which specialises in handling dry mixed recycling waste streams at its advanced facilities in Hartlepool. The trial has already proven successful, with over 80,000 bags of flexible plastic packaging collected so far.

This October, the project will significantly expand to cover 35,000 homes, offering even more residents the opportunity to recycle these hard-to-manage materials. As one of the key partners in the FPF FlexCollect initiative, J&B Recycling is instrumental in ensuring that the plastics collected are properly separated from other materials ready for reprocessing, helping Newcastle move closer to its environmental goals.

Mark Penny, Contract Lead for J&B Recycling, said: "We are committed to supporting Newcastle City Council with the expansion of the FPF FlexCollect project. Flexible plastic packaging is notoriously difficult to recycle, but with the right collection methods and infrastructure in place, we can make a significant impact. This project is helping FPF FlexCollect and the industry as a whole to determine how best to include flexible plastic packaging in kerbside collections, forming part of Simpler Recycling."

He also added: "The quality of the overall kerbside recycling collected in the trial areas has also improved since the introduction of the survival bags for flexible plastic packaging. This might be because residents on those rounds are paying more attention to their recycling, the amount of contamination has reduced."

The FPF FlexCollect project, funded Flexible Plastic Fund, is running pilots with nine councils across the UK, including Newcastle. It aims to create a blueprint for future kerbside collections of flexible plastic packaging nationwide, with the goal of full-scale rollouts by 2027.