Advetec targets plastic digestion with £600k of R&D investment

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Organic waste treatment specialist Advetec has announced it will be investing £600,000 in new laboratories and staff in order to expand its operations and target the digestion of plastic waste.

Primarily, this investment will see a doubling of office space with increased storage facilities and the development of a new purpose-built laboratory for Research and Development (R&D) with three state-of-the-art pilot plants, which will test and trial pre- and post-treatment liquid and solid organic waste streams, to ensure optimal anaerobic digester performance.

Advetec will also undertake careful analysis of a company’s waste stream to determine the calorific or nutritional value of output waste material that can then be used by a range of customers around the world.

R&D efforts will also be directed to Class 1 waste including animal by-product, medical and air travel waste. However, plastic digestion and the effective conversion of mixed solid residual waste as a consistent feedstock for energy-from-waste operations will be the primary focus.

Group CEO Craig Shaw, a former underwater explorer, said: “Our ethos is that all waste is a resource worth harvesting. With 100 years’ worth of plastic garbage floating around our ecosystem, we have a responsibility to deal with it. Just removing plastic from the sea then dumping it into the ground is not a solution. Hence our Circular Solution: collect it, process it and reuse it. We started by developing our Advetec XO reactor (an on-site plant that reduces waste by 60-90 per cent within 24-72 hours) and now add R&D into plastic degradation to bring us closer to finding a solution to deal with plastics and save our oceans, a cause particularly close to my heart.”

The investment has allowed Advetec to immediately employ an additional 17 staff at its operational base in Bath, including engineers, project managers and sales team members, and expects to add a further 30 technical staff by the end of 2018.

You can find out more about Advetec by visiting the company’s website.