Money from waste

A mountain of polystyrene has been reduced to a few pallets of recyclable material thanks to help from Greenbank Waste Solutions.

Braintree-based RDC remarkets, redeploys and recycles more than 1.5million items of ICT equipment every year from its dedicated IT reuse facility and faced an uphill struggle to dispose of the protective expanded polystyrene packaging used extensively by manufacturers and distributors of IT equipment.

However, since Greenbank installed a Cobalt SC2000 compactor 12 months ago, the pile of polystyrene has reduced fifty-fold. Matthew Embley, RDC's recycling services manager, said to take the 462 noncompacted bags of polystyrene to landfill would have taken 36 lorries to collect, costing over £8000. Now, the resulting material, in easy-to-handle polystyrene briquettes, fills just 16 pallets which not only fit onto one lorry but can be sold for over £1000.