BMRA member Sackers has invested £750,000 in a brand-new cable granulator for the recovery of copper. The machine that will be able to process 84kg of cable per minute, will be up and running in February. It will run 8 hours a day and is the only one of its size in East Anglia. 

David Dodds, Managing Director of Sackers said: “Our aim is to recover, recover, recover. The more we can extract from our scrap products the more we can recycle. Copper is an extremely valuable commodity and one of the cheapest metals to be recycled with massive environmental benefits. In order to extract copper from raw material the energy required is approximately 100 Gigajoule per tonne, that is 16 barrels of crude oil. Recycling copper uses much less energy, about 10 Gigajoule/tonne, that’s only 10% of the energy needed for extraction. This energy saving leads to the conservation of valuable reserves of oil, gas or coal and reduces the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere.”

As well as the copper, the plastic and steel will also be recovered and sold to international markets.

Sackers has two waste plants, one specialising in scrap metal and the other processes general waste. The business has grown significantly over the past few years and is able to recycle more than 90% of all waste that enters the premises.