Companies in the Thames Valley area os southern England are being encouraged to participate in a pilot PVC plastics recycling project backed by the British Plastics Federation (BPF).

Letsrecycle.com reports that PVC materials from the flooring, window, piping, and guttering markets, will be collected in the Reading and West London areas, with most of the material collected from the construction sector, and civic amenity sites.

The project comes as part of the European PVC industries voluntary commitment to the European Commission to reach set targets by 2010.

Vinyl 2010

The European PVC organisation co-ordinating the implementation of the voluntary commitment aims to recycle an additional 200,000 tonnes of post consumer waste by 2010.

Phil Law, director of public and industrial affairs at the BPF, the trade association for the UK plastics industry, said: "The trial will test methods of collection; sorting, separation, bulking and processing in order to provide vital data for future recycling initiatives."

The contract to collect and recycle the PVC plastic was awarded to Yorkshire-based Axion Recycling Ltd, which hopes to collect 200 tonnes of material over the next 6 months. Axion will be placing collection skips at CA sites and at the sites of any organisation that wishes to take participate in the project.