With increasing global concerns around plastic pollution and growing pressure from both regulators and consumers, it is critical for manufacturers to prioritise reducing their carbon footprint by incorporating more recycled plastics.
MBA Polymers UK offers an ABS product made from waste materials that are sourced from the expanding electronics sector. This product provides a sustainable alternative to traditional virgin plastics used in electronics, automotive manufacturing, and consumer goods. By keeping valuable materials in use and reducing landfill waste, MBA’s products help to protect our earth from unnecessary mining, while the team’s expertise ensures every product maintains the high quality required by manufacturers.
Paul Mayhew, general manager, explained: ‘We spent more than three years developing this material, with its game changing more than 95% post consumer recycled content. Everyone told me it couldn’t be done, but – at MBA’s cutting edge facility in Worksop, Nottinghamshire – we have the best engineers and scientists who managed to prove everyone wrong.’
As MBA Polymers UK is part of EMR, a global leader in sustainable materials, it benefits from a reliable, high quality feedstock, meaning the supply of end of life electronics and electrical equipment needed to create this ABS is secure enough to meet demand.
Paul added, ‘Creative collaboration with our customers played a crucial role in the development of our ABS product. Our team worked hand in hand with manufacturers across various sectors, particularly the electronics industry, to understand their specific material needs and specifications.
‘This close partnership ensured that the product not only met but exceeded customer expectations and technical requirements. Through rigorous testing to the highest standards, we can ensure that businesses receive top quality recycled polymers tailored to their needs. This project reinforced MBA’s value of prioritising strong stakeholder collaboration when driving innovation.’
In addition to benchmarking against the performance and specifications of other leading ABS polymers on the market, the company has also gained UL accreditation for its product, giving further confidence to manufacturers on both its traceability and quality. UL accreditation verifies the quality, safety and sustainability of recycled plastics, so that manufacturers, brand owners and end users feel confident in the performance and credibility of the materials.
The new ABS polymer is also the first of its kind to achieve the Carbon Trust’s Lower CO2 label. This accolade is based on a lifecycle assessment (LCA) which compares MBA Polymer UK’s key products to the equivalent LCA of their virgin plastic counterparts, confirming that this ABS product has an 86% lower carbon footprint.
‘We are very proud to be the first recycling business in the world to have our products achieve the Carbon Trust’s Lower CO2 label,’ Paul continued. ‘It shows our customers that our claims are externally verified and, when using MBA’s products, their efforts to significantly reduce CO2 emissions are not being misdirected.’
With manufacturers operating in a market where the demand for recycled ABS outweighs supply, the company has received global interest in this ABS product and is now exporting to businesses around the world, including the USA and Hong Kong.
‘There has been an amazing response to the product, which truly has transformed the market, and I have been excited by the interest it has already created among our customers, existing and new.
‘MBA Polymers UK has been at the forefront of recycling plastics for over 12 years. During that time, many doubted whether we could create an ABS product with such a high recycled content. ‘We have proven it can be done and developed a product that effectively repurposes waste electronics into high quality materials for the next generation of consumer products.’
He concluded, ‘The ABS product is the first of a new range of premium recycled polymers that we will be launching. By 2030, our target is to deliver 100,000 tonnes of recycled plastics content to manufacturers in a range of markets and industries – including high performance polymers like ABS – and this soon to be expanding range will be key to achieving that.’
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