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Southampton Has A Lotta Bottle
01 Apr 2003
A first shipment comprising 1,200 tonnes of recycled bottle-glass material left the Midland Glass Processing Company's (MGPC) new plant at the ABP Port of Southampton last month on board MV Sea Kestrel, bound for the ABP Port of Goole on the Humber Estuary. It would have required 45 articulated lorries to transport the same load by road.
The £2 million glass processing facility is the first of its type to be built in a British port. It uses state of the art colour sorting equipment imported from America and recycles used bottle-glass collected from Hampshire and surrounding areas into refined glass cullet which is then shipped coastally around the UK for use in the bottle making industry. It is anticipated that at least 24,000 tonnes of glass a year will be processed through the facility, resulting in almost 2,000 heavy goods vehicle movements being taken off the roads every year.
That number of movements would equate to over 640,000 lorry miles on the UK's overcrowded road network.
Construction of the new facility was partially funded by an £800,000 Freight Facilities Grant awarded by the UK Government to ABP Southampton and the port's independent specialist bulk stevedores, Solent Stevedores. The project was eligible for an FFG as, among other criteria, it replaced existing road transportation with the more environmentally friendly mode of coastal shipping.
MGPC's contracts manager Tim Gent said, 'An integrated element of this contract was the need to develop new and innovative markets for the collected glass. By locating the reprocessing facility at ABP's Port of Southampton, it enables the glass to be transported by coaster vessels as opposed to road, and opens up the opportunity to explore overseas markets.'
MJ Information No: 18114
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