Elemental Holding to Further Boost Its Share in the Refrigeration Recycling Segment
The capacity of Elemental Holding is set to increase up to 45,000 tons of waste refrigeration equipment. The Group, which is the segment’s leader in Poland and the Baltic countries, is going to build a new processing plant in Grodzisk Mazowiecki near Warsaw, Poland.
Construction of the new plant is going to commence in the third quarter of this year on a site near an existing installation that currently processes approx. 15,000 tonnes of refrigeration equipment per year. The new facility will have modern processing lines, with double the capacity, provided by the German company URT. The new plant, which meets the stringent WEEELABEX certification standards, will enable the processing of all types of refrigeration equipment, neutralization of all the hazardous substances contained therein, and recovery and re-use of valuable materials. The value of the investment planned by the Elemental Holding Group will reach around eight million Euro.
“The Polish recycling market of waste electrical and electronic equipment, including refrigerators, is growing very steadily. This is due to consistent shortening of the product life cycle of new equipment placed on the market, as well as the continued growth of the Polish housing market. Last year alone, a total of over 220,000 apartments and houses were delivered in Poland, that is 7 per cent more than the year before, each of which needs to be equipped with basic household appliances. This demand translates into higher weight of new equipment put on the market every year, which in turn means that more equipment needs to be recycled due to the minimum collection target set by EU regulations,” commented Anna Kostro, Management Board Member for Electrorecycling at Elemental Holding.
In 2021 alone, more than 50 million tons of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) will reach the global market. In the European Union, the sector is strictly regulated by community laws, which set minimum waste equipment collection targets for individual Member States. For Poland, the current target is no less than 65% of the average annual weight of new EEE placed on the market or 85% of the weight of WEEE generated on the territory of the country. As a result of the ban on import or export of WEEE imposed by the WEEE Directive, the operations of processing companies are generally limited to the territories of individual countries only.
Elemental Holding Group is a manufacturer of strategic materials sourced in a sustainable and environment-friendly way, including through the processing of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), catalysts, printed circuit boards (PCB) and non-ferrous metals. The Group is present in 15 countries across three continents: Europe, Asia and North America. Elemental Holding is among 18 leading European technological companies (including BASF, Solvay, Umicore, BMW, Saft, Varta) notified by the European Commission under the European Industrial Policy, which aims to create a sustainable mobility value chain in the EU.
Source: Elemental Holding Group (Warsaw, Poland, April 15, 2021)
