Plastic solution

ON THURSDAY along with my Liberal Democrat colleagues Cllrs Ross Henning (Chippenham – Lowden and Rowden) and Gavin Grant (Malmesbury), I had the chance to visit Recycling Technologies Ltd in Swindon.

We have all seen the David Attenborough documentary Blue Planet 2 showing the apocalypse that is waiting for us as plastics choke the seas, strangling turtles and filling the gullets of sea birds and fish.

How wonderful then, that in our own back yard, a British Company is on the cusp of finding a solution to this man-made disaster, by not only finding a way to deal with waste plastic of all kinds, including all the nasty stuff that we have been told cannot be recycled: black plastic, plastic wrappers, plastic bags, crisp packets, yoghurt pots even with food residue present.

But a way of doing this that is offering tens of jobs to local people, which is likely to go to hundreds of jobs, as the process becomes more widely known, and demand for the plants takes off, not only in this country, but around the world.

The process is a form of pyrolysis where waste plastics are heated without oxygen and reduced down to their constituent molecules of oils and waxes, ready to be processed back into useful products including new plastics, lubricants or indeed fuels.

This coming week sees the first 24 hour x 5 day continuous running of the machine.

I for one wish them all the luck in the world, for the world needs this.

I am pleased to see it is a home-grown industry that looks ripe to take on and profit from a problem that has seemed to be impossible to solve, until now.

Thanks to Adrian Haworth and his team for showing us around.

Dr Brian Mathew

Liberal Democrat Wiltshire Councillor for Box and Colerne