Sustainable technology business TOMRA and Norway-based recycling company Plastretur have signed a majority ownership agreement to build a new plastic packaging sorting plant in Norway.
The new facility is being built with an investment of approximately NKr600m ($50m).
It will be located at Holtskogen Næringspark, Indre Østfold Holtskogen, near Norway's capital of Oslo.
The effort is a joint venture effort between TOMRA and Plastretur, with a 65% and 35% partnership, respectively.
TOMRA Feedstock senior vice-president Joachim N Amland said: “I am thrilled to be working on this initiative, which will play a key role in transitioning Norway’s plastic packaging into a circular economy.”
Under this partnership, Plastretur will be responsible for sourcing plastic packaging waste from all local municipalities, trade stores and businesses and delivering it to the facility as ‘input’.
Meanwhile, TOMRA will work on grading the plastic fractions on the basis of their types and then selling the resulting output.
This will be Norway’s first plastic packaging fine-sorting facility to accept Norwegian municipality-sourced, separated, as well as mechanically obtained mixed-plastic waste.
The facility will sort the collected plastic waste into seven categories based on its specifications and will later be processed into high-quality, ready-to-use fractions for use by different industries to manufacture new packaging and products.
As of now, plastic packaging waste collected from Norwegian households, according to Plastretur, is exclusively sorted and processed in Germany.
Construction of the Norway-based facility is expected to commence by the end of June this year.
The plant will be commissioned in the fourth quarter of 2024 and is predicted to be fully operational in the first quarter of 2025.
Once open, the plant will have an estimated sorting capacity of approximately 90,000 tonnes of plastics every year.
Plastretur CEO Karl Johan Ingvaldsen said: “The plant will be the cornerstone in building the national infrastructure needed to reach future recycling targets.
“With this plant we are taking a major part in building a Norwegian plastic recycling industry and reducing the cross-border transport of waste.”
