A Scottish farm waste recycling business is aiming to double its turnover and profits after purchasing new machinery.
Dumfries-based Solway Recycling, which collects around 5,000 tonnes of single-use plastic waste from 3,500 farms across the UK each year, will import a plastic rolling machine from Europe that turns waste into thick sheets of plastic.
The move comes after it secured seven-figure funding from HSBC UK.
The new technology should further reduce the carbon footprint of the recycling process and enable Solway Recycling to roughly double turnover and profits over the next five years.
Previously, Solway Recycling sent its collected raw plastic waste to third party businesses to create the plastic sheets.
The sheets can be used to create outdoors products, from pig pens to garden benches on site, as well as being sold on to farmers and other business.
The new machinery and way of working at Solway Recycling is set to create 12 new jobs, which will focus on operating the new equipment.
Roy Hiddleston, managing director at Solway Recycling, said: “We’re working with a new generation of more-environmentally conscious farmers today, and so it’s great to be able to improve the service we offer them.
“The new machinery will help us speed up our operations and will also allow us to enter new markets as we’ll be able to help other local businesses recycle their plastic too.”
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