WRAP and Oakdene Hollins assess Enval Process

Enval, a leading provider of recycling and environmental technology solutions, announces that, following a series of trials carried out on Enval’s continuous process pilot plant, the Enval Process has proved financially and environmentally viable for treating post-consumer laminate waste.

Enval is a modern environmental services company, focused on providing specialist solutions across industrial, commercial and municipal sectors to deliver value from waste. Enval’s patented technology offers a genuine recycling route for plastic/aluminium laminate packaging that has, to date, been unrecyclable. The award-winning technology separates the material into its constituent components, producing clean aluminium ready for introduction into the secondary aluminium supply chain and hydrocarbons that can be used as fuel or chemical feedstock. The process offers a much more beneficial outcome for waste that would otherwise be sent to landfill or incinerated.

The trials examined the capability of current technologies, already widely used by the waste handling industry, to extract Enval’s target laminate material from a typical waste stream in a Materials Recovery Facility, the ability of the Enval process to produce clean aluminium and other useful products from this material and the potential profit based on valuation of the process outputs. The trials were managed and overseen by Oakdene Hollins and funded by WRAP. According to Oakdene Hollins, “the results indicate that the process is technologically and environmentally sound. The carbon emissions associated with the process would be approximately half of that associated with the production of primary aluminium alone”.

”Enval is delighted to announce the completion of this series of trials,” said David Boorman, Business Development Director at Enval. ”The publicly available report on this work provides an independent, third party verification of the viability of our solution. It demonstrates that the Enval Process is financially and environmentally beneficial for the operator and enhances Enval’s credibility as we proceed with scaling up the technology to commercial capacity for operation within a Material Recovery Facility.”

Claire Shrewsbury, Packaging Programme Manager at WRAP, commented: “It is great to know that there is a technology available that can process this type of material to recover valuable products that would otherwise have gone to landfill. The next challenge will be to determine a viable route for collecting these materials from the waste stream.”

Please visit the WRAP website to download the published report.