Key Players

London Thames Gateway is already home to a wealth of industry leaders......

EMR, one of the world's largest recycling companies, and the largest in the UK, is reaping the benefits of a London Thames Gateway location, with depots in Canning Town and Erith, and a recyclable steel transfer point at Thames Wharf. Handling over 8.5 million tonnes of scrap metal a year, EMR leads the way in the shredding of post-consumer durables and the high-tech granulation and dense media separation of mixed materials for customers in both the private and public sector.

Express Recycling, based in Rainham, has built London's only plastics reprocessing facility capable of processing municipal and ELV mixed plastics. The company realised the market opportunity for dealing with WEEE and ELV derived materials, and invested over £2 million into their Rainham site. The facility opened in April 2006 and has the capacity to process 60,000 tonnes of waste plastics per annum. The plant will help divert at least 140,000 tonnes of plastic from going into landfill and create 45 jobs over the next five years. Express is developing exciting new technology and is looking at the possibility of setting up another plant.

Bywaters' cutting edge Materials Recovery Facility is part of a £30 million investment in a 9.2 acre site in Bow, east London. With an input capacity of up to 250,000 tonnes per year, it is the largest undercover dry recyclables MRF in the capital.

Shanks Waste Management is among the top five waste management companies in the UK. Shanks will invest £100 million over the course of their 25 year contract with the East London Waste Authority to increase recycling and composting and significantly reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

Currently, Shanks are building several Mechanical Biological Treatment facilities in east London which are the first of their kind in the UK. Shanks have procured technology from all over the world for these new facilities.

London Thames Gateway is also home to Day Group, who manufacture secondary materials from waste container glass at their site in Charlton. Glass is processed to produce a higher-value aggregate product for construction purposes. The site has become a centre of excellence in the area of glass re-processing and the development of alternative markets for re-processed glass, such as aggregates, shot blasting material and water filtration media. The riverside site provides the ideal base for greater river transport to move both feedstock (waste glass) and finished products into and away from the site.

Alongside the glass facility in Charlton, large quantities of construction debris are reprocessed for use in concrete production. The facility is able to process 200,000 tonnes of construction and demolition waste per year and approximately 1,500 tonnes per day.

F J Church and Sons specialises in recycling non ferrous scrap metals and, since 2001, has led the way in the recycling of used Catalytic Converters. With a staff of 47, material is sourced locally, and from around the UK, Eire, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.

Material is consolidated at the Rainham facility, where it is processed to individual customer requirements and packed for export, or sale to the domestic market. 92% of our business is export, and QC assured products can be shipped direct from suppliers to customers in Europe, US, India and the Pacific Rim.

Veolia's composting facility in Rainham, processes 50,000 tonnes per annum. The facility generates a wide range of products for bioremediation, soil regeneration and landscaping projects, which have already been used in the development of the original Millennium Dome site and Canary Wharf.

Closed Loop Recycling's revolutionary new plant, at Dagenham Dock's Sustainable Industries Park, is the first in the UK to turn old water, soft drinks and milk bottles back into recycled raw material suitable for food and drinks products.

The facility, which opened in June 2008, will take in around 35,000 tonnes per year of mixed polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic bottles. The bottles are sorted into PET and HDPE streams, turning the PET plastic back into material that can be made into resin and flakes suitable for manufacturing new packaging for food and drinks products, and the HDPE into raw material for milk bottles.

The first customers to purchase the recycled food grade plastic from the plant include Coca-Cola Enterprises, Marks & Spencer, Nampak and Solo Cup (Europe).

Using leading edge technologies, Closed Loop Recycling will turn what may have been previously exported to developing countries at low value or discarded into landfill, into new material suitable for food and drink packaging, supplied locally. London Thames Gateway has provided the conditions for the company to realise its "Closed Loop" philosophy in the UK. 

Combined Energy Solutions (CESenergy), a wholly Irish owned company that design, build and manage energy efficient CHP/Tri-generation heating and cooling systems has recently opened it's UK office in Shoreditch.

Cyclamax has announced plans to build its fourth - and flagship - facility on a 3.5 hectare site at the London Sustainable Industries Park (SIP) in Dagenham Dock. The 100,000 tonne capacity gasification plant will produce up to 15 mega watts of energy a year. It will provide enough power for up to 20,000 homes (approximately 45 per cent of all the households in Barking & Dagenham) and the low carbon renewable energy will offset 20,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year, an equivalent to taking 20,000 cars off the road. All this is made possible by using commercial waste including non-recyclable waste from offices, restaurants and shops that would otherwise have gone to landfill. Cyclamax expect to be operational in early 2012.

Greenpeace backed Blue NG in Beckton won permission to build the UK's first vegetable oil fuelled power station last year, which is to be installed at the site of a National Grid gas pressure reduction station and will burn locally sourced vegetable oil to generate up to 20MW electricity.

Download the London Thames Gateway Environmental Technologies map.