Member Control Panel
Understanding the plastics recycling industry value chain
| By Keith Freegard, Axion Recycling Ltd How do you add value by recycling plastics? Where in the process is most value added to the product? And who appreciates the real value of the material? The act of ‘RECYCLING’ is a complex process which starts with the disposal of waste items and ends with the re-use of a value-added material to deliver a set of customer benefits. The full recovery process from the point of waste-creation to eventual re-use as part of a new product, can involve a large number of collection, sorting and separation stages. Often, several complex processing and conversion operations take place and the recovered material passes through several changes of ownership before returning to a new-life with a consumer. Each successive owner of the material will be driven to either minimize the cost of waste disposal or to maximize the net profit of re-processing during their temporary ownership phase as part of the complete recycling loop. The same plastic item, which changes from being a ‘waste problem = cost’ to the end-of-life disposer, has be ‘re-born’ as a ‘product = value’ when fully recycled and re-used. The skill for the recycler is to be aware of how to preserve the embedded value in the material as it moves through the whole, complex process. ‘User Value = perceived benefits’ A marketing manager in the recycling sector needs to know how to add more value by increasing the number of customer benefits associated with the use of the supplied polymer material. Therefore adding value to a polymer implies an ability to understand the exact needs of the customers (N.B. – there ARE more than one) and at what point in the downstream value chain the ‘real customer’ is positioned. Example When selling resin compound direct to a moulder of a component for electrical goods, the plastic buyer at the moulding company simply wants a good quality polymer which meets the technical specification and at the lowest possible price per moulded part. However the part is only being made to meet the demands of the electrical goods manufacturer, who will use the part in a final assembly, and the electrical goods are then sold onto a retailer and eventually an end-user – maybe a householder or a business consumer. Only at the final purchasing point (retailer-to-consumer) are ALL of the attributes of the product evaluated against the end-user customer’s list of important benefits – this list might include, brand-name, functionality, artistic style and design, energy consumption, reliability AND – as an increasing part of the ‘overall purchasing decision’ – environmental impact of the item – or ‘greenness’! (In today’s highly competitive marketplace it is a ‘given’ that the customer will be faced with several choices of branded goods which are almost equal on a price versus functionality comparison; so it is the evaluation of the above list of perceived benefits which swing the final choice of product.) This makes life for the plastic recycler difficult: at the first sales transaction, the polymer product has to ‘win’ on a simple price and technical performance comparison (being made by the plastics buyer and manufacturer’s equipment designer), BUT also there is a more complex sales and marketing job to be done to carry the perceived benefits of the product’s unique history and environmental credentials all the way down the value chain to the eventual purchaser of the item in a retail environment. The secret of success in this competitive arena is to realise the importance of the upstream supply chain into the recycling factory and to organise the flow of materials so that the value-adding attributes of the waste feed-stocks are not lost in the re-processing stage. In order to carry forwards the aspects of the upstream supply chain through the recycling and conversion processes and make sure that they are being noticed and valued by the end-users (i.e. OEMS, retailers and consumers) – the recycler must set up fully traceable inward supply streams with clearly defined segregation between different groups of feed-stocks. For example, at Axion Polymers we produce each of our primary polymer grades from exactly the same type of waste feedstock. So grade ‘Axpoly® PS01 – high-impact polystyrene’ is only made from recycled refrigerator plastics collected under the WEEE processing system. Keeping this firm and fixed link between the origin of the waste feedstock and the individual grade adds-value to the polymer we produce. Customers like to know ‘where has it come from’ and being able to guarantee this in a fully traceable manner for every batch we produce is perceived as important to the downstream users. Statements such as ‘Washing machine with parts made from recycled fridge plastics’ OR ‘This flat-screen monitor has been made with plastics recycled from end-of-life TVs’ convey a simple-to-understand model of sustainable product manufacturing to the end-user and have a kind-of ‘green-logic’ which makes sense to the man on the street. Once the principle of keeping the inward raw material waste streams well-defined and segregated has been established and ‘built-into’ the company’s operating model, other benefits start to appear. For example, it is then relatively straight forward to evaluate the carbon impact of the raw material supply chain and the processing stages for each of the Axpoly grades, because the structure of the inward supply chain is very similar across the defined set of suppliers in the WEEE treatment sector. Carbon Footprinting techniques can be used in parallel across the different suppliers to label each of the Axpoly grades with a fixed and audited carbon impact figure. This new ‘carbon currency’ is beginning to be understood and utilised by retailers as a useful way to evidence and display the sustainable value of products onto consumer goods at the point of purchasing.  IMAGE: AXION FOOTPRINT SPLIT FOR PS13 At Axion Polymers we have successfully combined these end-user perceived values into our ‘Axpoly®’ brand-name which carries forward the inbuilt attributes of quality, reliability, low-carbon and traceable origin of the material down the value chain to the person who gains most benefit from those ‘brand-values’. Our ultimate success is measured when the marketing manager in a large OEM tells his equipment designer to specify the Axpoly® brand and the moulder’s plastic buyer is left with no choice but to ‘call Axion!’ KEITH FREEGARD Axion Polymers Tel: +44 (0) 208 567 1425 Fax: +44 (0) 709 234 2188 Email: kfreegard@axionrecycling.com Web: www.axionrecycling.com |
