BM Tech Limited

Brothers Ben and James Morley are making great strides in the world of plastic recycling thanks to their GEP Demonstrator grant.

Having started out in 2005 as an engineering company specialising in designing equipment for pumping sand and gravel for quarries, they spotted a gap in the market for recycling plastic stripped out of water treatment plants and power station cooling towers at the end of its useful life.

Following a decade spent trying different methods to turn the redundant plastic into a material that people wanted to buy and use, the duo are now able to recycle the plastic into a flake which is sold for use in manufacturing products such as drainage pipes, gutters, and ducting.

BM Tech Ltd have taken their operation to the next level with the help of a c.£112,000 grant to help them design and build two key pieces of kit.

The first piece of equipment will shred and compact the material removed from the cooling towers increasing the transport capacity from three or four tonnes per lorry load to up to 26 tonnes.

And the second piece of machinery is a ‘pre-cleaner’ to remove any unwanted debris from the plastic before it is processed. This is currently carried out by hand and significantly slows down the operation.

James said: “Applying for the funding has been a really positive process. We knew that the project would reduce carbon emissions by nature of us recycling PVC which has in the past proved hard to reuse.

But the Green Entrepreneurs Programme has really challenged us to think about the carbon emissions generated in the production process and come up with solutions – which are to reduce the number of lorry journeys, and speed up our processes to reduce the time we need to have a large diesel generator running.

From a cash flow perspective, we just wouldn’t have been able to run both these projects at the same time without the Green Entrepreneurs grant. It’s helped us to accelerate and make this project happen.”