BP&R spoke with Dane McWilliams, sales account manager at Luxus Limited, a UK-based manufacturer of recycled plastic compounds, covering the company’s origins, industry diversification and latest developments in economic recycling and sustainability.
Key Highlights:
- Luxus has been on the Fairfield Industrial Estate ever since and is looking forward to celebrating 60 years of trading in January.
- The company supplies a diverse range of markets, including building and construction, household products, waste management, building materials, and logistics packaging to name just a few.
- Luxus maintains ongoing monitoring throughout the entire process from start to finish to ensure the product delivered to our customer is of the agreed standard.
The story of Luxus Limited begins with a man named Ronald Tonn, a US Army veteran. After working for a US plastics company, he came to the UK in the 1950s to establish its European arm.
In 1965, Ron Tonn began Luxus as a trading company based in London, however soon found that to continue to trade polymer, he needed a means of recycling manufacturing waste. Then, in 1967, Tonn acquired a disused factory in Louth, Lincolnshire, to support recycling for local manufacturers and producers in the North East. The location provided access to an east coast port for exporting to Scandinavia, Europe, and the USA. By 1976, increasing demand led to the purchase of land on the Fairfield Industrial Estate in Louth to build a dedicated recycling and compounding facility, marking the start of various long-standing relationships with suppliers of post-industrial and post-consumer material, recyclers, manufacturers of plastic products and the local community.
In 1982, phase one of the facility's development was completed, followed by the purchase of a separate recycling facility. This move separated recycling from compounding as the demand for more sophisticated compounds grew.
Luxus has been on the Fairfield Industrial Estate ever since and is looking forward to celebrating 60 years of trading in January. “We're not just a recycler, we're a technical compounder,” McWilliams noted. Today, Luxus employs around 170 people, spanning a compounding facility, commercial centre, recycling centre, and a masterbatch manufacturer in South Wales (Colour Tone Masterbatch Ltd).
Branching out
Luxus supplied a diverse range of markets, including building and construction, household products, waste management, building materials, and logistics packaging to name just a few. Over two decades ago, Luxus expanded into the automotive industry, becoming a trusted supplier of recycled content compounds for major car manufacturers including colour-matched grades approved for use in ‘A’ surface interior applications. “Currently, there’s a big push to comply with evolving End-of-Life vehicle regulation and the use of post-consumer automotive materials back into automotive applications,” McWilliams explained. “We’ve been supplying post-consumer recycled material to the automotive industry for more than 20 years.”
Sustainability is a cornerstone of the Luxus heritage and is always at the forefront of Luxus innovations. The "bin to bin" scheme collects bins from local councils and transforms them into new compounds for wheely bin production, reducing waste and providing high-impact strength recycled material. Another example is within transportation: “We recycle end-of-life transportation crates or totes from a range of client from supermarkets to the post office,” McWilliams said. “We re-grind, test, formulate, and enhance them to create a polymer compound for reuse in the same application without changing the moulding machine parameters.”
Quality and customer satisfaction
Luxus offers some standard grades but prides itself on custom, made-to-order recycled polymer compounds. “Whilst we do produce a range of stock grade, our USP is tailoring compounds to meet our clients’ exacting specifications on a repeatable basis,” McWilliams explained. This flexibility helps Luxus adapt to market demands. “We work with clients from the design stage to engineer solutions with a focus on true sustainability without compromise to product performance. We formulate products with repeatability in mind and at least three alternative feedstock options to manage supply risks. Transparency with clients is key; if material supply is limited, we discuss options to achieve the desired outcome.”
Luxus
Beyond compounding, Luxus also specialises in material property enhancement. “Clients often want to move away from prime polymers to recycled compounds. We identify key properties, create sustainable formulations, and consistently produce material to the approved specifications. If on the rare occasion, a fully recycled compound cannot meet the brief, we can still offer lower CO2 alternatives than pure prime. For instance, some compounds supplied to meet automotive specifications may contain -prime polymer with 30% to 60% PCR. We’re also developing each automotive grade to include a percentage of ELV to meet upcoming European demands,” McWilliams added.
To optimise quality control, the team follows a rigorous multi-step procedure. First, all incoming feedstock is tested, evaluated and characterised; and non-compliant material will be rejected at this stage. Stage 2 is an AI-assisted predictive formulation, followed by small-scale blends created and tested in the lab to ensure they meet the agreed specifications. “The created formulation is then issued to the production team to reproduce the formulation in large-scale batches. The production team then continually sample manufactured product to the laboratory throughout the production run, to ensure the product continues to meet specification,” said McWilliams.
Luxus maintains ongoing monitoring throughout the entire process from start to finish to ensure the product delivered to our customer is of the agreed standard.
Driving sustainability and performance
Luxus shared details of several recent projects, centred around their ethos of Art, Science and Innovation and with sustainability, product and manufacturing performance improvement at their core.
One in-house development was a three-year project completed last year to discover a more effective UV stabiliser for polymer compounds, mainly used in construction such as roofing products. Through extensive testing and trialling with different combinations of additives, Luxus scientists formulated an “enhanced UV package” that significantly improves UV stability, weather resistance and colour fade.
Using its proprietary UV and weather accelerator, Luxus simulated weather testing. After 11,000 hours, the enhanced package showed a remarkably lower Delta E value (a measure of colour change), compared to the other packages. Not only that, but having had commercial considerations in mind throughout development, the additional added cost of achieving this in comparison to the performance improvement is relatively small. So, technically and commercially it ticked all the boxes said McWilliams.
Meanwhile, Project Micro Dry was a two-and-a-half-year collaborative project funded by the Department for Energy, Sustainability and Net Zero. The result was an end-to-end energy reduction system that enables economic recycling of low-grade PCR polymer. Between 2021 and 2023, the project resulted in a 7% energy reduction with most recent results showing additional incremental savings.
Finally, Project Odour Control is currently underway. Also, a collaborative part-funded project, Luxus is reducing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) within polymer compounds. Utilising novel technologies to remove odour pre, post and during production. The project's completion date is expected in January and is set to tie in nicely with the company’s 60th anniversary.