How we recycle our used Malt Bags with Suez Cornwall
Like many small brewers, we use bag malt as we don’t have space for malt silos. This leaves us with a problem, malt bags.
While Malsters have made great strides to ensure that their malt bags are produced responsibly, being made of 100% recyclable materials, you can’t just put them in your mixed recycling as the malt dust inside means they can’t be recycled in the usual way. The easy route is to put them into your general waste which is bueno.
As part of our commitment to sustainable development, we needed to find a solution. So after over a year of conversations and a 20 foot container’s worth of malt bags, we finally have one. We purchased a baler from QCR recycling equipment which allows us to compact the bags down to 50 kilo bales running on our existing compressed air supply.
Over a year’s worth of malt bags compressed into five neat bales. We then loaded the bales into the back of our electric van and drove them down to the Suez recycling plant in Pool, Redruth. From here our five bales we put into their baler which will make a 250 kilo bale. By separating it out into it’s own waste stream it allows the plastic to be stored until there’s enough to be sent off for further processing.
We’ll update you on the next part of this journey!
