"Recycle your used fish boxes" says Until recently used PS fish boxes used to be a waste headache for fish producers in the UK, because unlike clean EPS packaging, used fish boxes could not be recycled. "The good news for the fish industry is that their used fish boxes can now be recycled; this demonstrates the continuing technical innovation the industry is putting into developing recycling" says Andrew Barnetson, Environmental Affairs Manager, EPS Packaging Group. "There are two UK recyclers that will take EPS packaging that has been ‘contaminated’ with fresh fish and reprocess the material into a clean polystyrene bead that can be sold to industry". The technology to recycle fish boxes is fairly new in the UK. Until recently Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) fish boxes could only be sent to landfill with the inherent costs involved. WES Recycling in Stockton on Tees successfully recycled their first fish boxes 18 months ago. "We had to adjust our process to deal with the extra moisture in used fish boxes which can be up to 40 per cent of the total compacted weight," says Kieron Knight, Recycling Manager, WES Recycling. "After some work we have developed a process that delivers a clean reprocessed polystyrene bead. That means that if we can get a large supply of fish box material that has been hosed down and then compacted we will pay for it." 'We have fresh fish air-freighted to us daily from Iceland and other countries in EPS boxes' explains Katarina Peacock, Technical Manager at Sealord Caistor. "We transfer the fish from the boxes into plastic trays in readiness for production. The EPS is then compacted into logs, which are palletised and shrink-wrapped. WES collects full loads of 19 to 25 pallets of compacted EPS on a regular basis. For Sealord it works very well because it is a packaging minimisation process which has provided great benefits across the Sealord sites." Diane Gibson of Seachill, Grimsby — a leading supplier of fish to a large retail group — has a contract with a fish box recycler: "All the boxes that come to us are recycled. Our recycler has installed a compacter free of charge and comes regularly to collect the compacted waste, which is eventually made into picture frames and other mouldings. "That solves the problem our end, but we are still sending out around 30,000 boxes a week ourselves. They all end up at individual stores and are not being recycled." Andrew Barnetson acknowledges that collecting from companies like Seachill is just the first step: "We would like to see the supermarkets tackling this issue too. We know that a manager at one of the largest is currently looking into recycling EPS and we hope that he will find a way to make it work economically." Making the economics work is crucial to setting up a successful recycling chain. Andrew Barnetson: "For fish processors who are paying to have their used EPS fish boxes put into landfill, recycling offers an economic and environmental alternative and, as Kieron Knight explained, in some cases recyclers will pay for the compacted fish box material which gives an added economic incentive to get a recycling scheme organised." For information or advice about recycling EPS contact Andrew Barnetson on 020 7457 5014 or email info@eps.co.uk
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The fish and ice in the boxes 'contaminated' the EPS making it almost impossible to recycle them.
