From EIC Accelerator Grant to BA Glass: Recresco's Metal Sorter

Glass bottles reach recyclers with their caps still on. Aluminium screw tops, foil and other metal ride along with the cullet, the crushed glass that bottle makers remelt, and most of it ends up sold as low-grade scrap or lost. Recresco, a family-owned glass recycler based in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, told the European Commission it could change that. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's October 2019 cut-off it won a grant for OMR, a project to combine X-ray fluorescence, shape recognition and machine learning to recover "mixed non-ferrous metals from co-mingled waste", according to the Commission's list of selected companies and CORDIS. The list names Recresco as the only beneficiary of the project, with a grant-only award.

By September 2022 Recresco had installed a £5.5 million line of shredders, X-ray sorters and a briquetting press at its Ellesmere Port site, due to run by the end of that month and built to turn bottle caps into furnace-ready aluminium blocks, according to Let's Recycle and Glass International. A year after the EU project closed, the Gent family sold the company to BA Glass, a glass packaging group with plants across Europe. The machine got built. The European roll-out the grant was meant to start did not.

A BA Glass Subsidiary That Sells Cullet

Recresco is active, profitable and no longer independent. BA Glass and the Gent family agreed the deal on 7 December 2023, according to BA Glass, and the company's 2023 accounts date completion to 20 December 2023. That day Graham Gent, Timothy Gent and John Richard Hancock left the board and three directors based in Portugal joined it, according to the Companies House filing history. BA Glass chief executive Sandra Santos said the purchase gave her group access to "high-quality recycled glass", Let's Recycle reported. No price was published.

The company's own story starts long before the current legal entity. Let's Recycle says Alan Gent set up Recresco in Norfolk in 1973; the strategic report in the 2025 accounts says it was "established in 1978". Companies House shows that the present Recresco Limited was incorporated on 6 September 2000 as Five Doves Limited, traded as Midland Glass Processing Company Limited until November 2003, and then took the Recresco name, according to its register entry. The register lists it as active, with accounts for 2025 filed on 25 September 2026. The Gazette's insolvency notices contain nothing about Recresco Limited; the two hits there concern a different company whose registered office is a "Recresco Site" in Swanscombe.

The 2026 news has been less comfortable. After an Environment Agency site visit, Recresco stopped reprocessing "Glass Other", the grade of materials recovery facility glass that is not fit for remelt, at Ellesmere Port in March 2026, and a suspension notice for that accreditation was served on 9 July 2026, according to Let's Recycle. The article's headline calls it a revocation, its text a suspension. About 6,000 tonnes of glass were left on site that could not be reprocessed; a company spokesperson said the suspension had "no practical impact" on the main remelt business.

The Technology: X-Rays for Bottle Caps

Metal in co-mingled collections is usually pulled out with magnets and eddy current separators. That removes it from the glass but leaves a jumble of aluminium, steel, copper alloys and attached rubber or plastic seals that the OMR final report says is "currently extracted by 'eddy current' systems" and then sold with little treatment. X-ray fluorescence reads the elemental make-up of each piece, so a sorter can tell aluminium from other metals; OMR proposed to add shape recognition and machine learning to the same stream, and to turn "a low value feedstock into several high value output streams", including copper, tin, aluminium, gold, silver and zinc, the CORDIS objective says.

The line that was built is narrower than that objective. Let's Recycle, Glass International and AlCircle describe shredders, X-ray fluorescence sorting supplied by the Austrian firm Redwave to remove other metals, and an ATM press that squeezes aluminium caps under 500 tonnes of pressure into briquettes for smelting. About 20 tonnes of metal lids passed through the Ellesmere Port plant each week, the articles say; Recresco had bought that site in 2020, according to Let's Recycle. The project report claims the process produced "pucks containing 99% aluminium which is first of its kind". No independent test of that purity has been published, and none of the sources describes separate copper, tin, gold, silver or zinc products.

What OMR Promised, and What the Record Shows

OMR ran from 1 April 2020 to 31 December 2022 after the grant was signed on 17 March 2020, with an EU contribution of €2,101,728 towards a total cost of €3,002,468.75, according to CORDIS. It finished on schedule, and the report for the second period lists what was done: plant layouts and 3D models, the installation and commissioning of the prototype, software parameters, operator training and validation runs "to establish purity and flow of infeed material". It also says that discussions with buyers "within UK, Europe and India" about "the upcoming sale of the produced pucks" had taken place. No sale or buyer has been announced since.

The commercial promises were larger. The CORDIS objective said Recresco aimed "to operate 3 new sorting facilities by year 4 post project, generating €12.1m in additional turnover and creating 106 new direct jobs". The final report adds that Benelux, Spain, Portugal, Germany and France were the prime locations and that "it is our intention to set up facilities in these EU countries". Year four after the project is 2026. Recresco still runs the same two plants, Ellesmere Port and Cwmbran, plus its head office, according to its website and its 2025 accounts, and no new metal sorting site has been reported anywhere.

1. Prototype line installed and commissionedDeliveredCORDIS report; installed at Ellesmere Port and due to run from the end of September 2022, per Let's Recycle.
2. Software, training and validation runsDeliveredReported complete in the period 2 report.
3. High-purity aluminium outputSelf-reported99% aluminium pucks claimed by the company; no independent test published.
4. Several output streams: copper, tin, zinc, gold, silverNot achievedOnly aluminium briquettes are described in any source.
5. Buyers for the output, market penetrationNot achieved"Discussions" at project end; no customer announced.
6. 3 new sorting plants by year 4 after the projectNot achievedNone announced; same two UK plants in 2026.
7. 106 new direct jobs and €12.1M extra turnoverNot achievedStaff 79 in 2019, 84 in 2025; no metal revenue disclosed.

Measured against the CORDIS objective, OMR is a technical delivery and a commercial miss. Recresco built and ran a working line, finished on time and put a larger sum of its own money into the plant than the EU did. But the project was sold to the EIC as the start of a pan-European network of metal recovery plants with several high-value metal products. What exists in public is one aluminium cap line inside a British glass plant.

The Money

Recresco's accounts show a growing, profitable company. Turnover rose from £16.7 million in 2019 to £69.3 million in 2023, and profit after tax jumped from £755,491 to £18.7 million in 2022 and £18.3 million in 2023, according to the full accounts filed at Companies House. The directors credit an investment programme at Cwmbran and Ellesmere Port approved in 2019, which the 2023 strategic report says "significantly increased production and quality" of the cullet. The accounts do not mention OMR or metal sales by name, and the 2025 note on turnover splits revenue only into glass and export, Packaging Recovery Notes (PRNs) and "other".

Under BA Glass the numbers have come down. Turnover fell to £62.6 million in 2024 and £44.7 million in 2025, which the 2025 strategic report blames on a 19% drop in cullet tonnage sold and on the UK's Extended Producer Responsibility rules for packaging, in force since 1 January 2025, which it says moved some packers away from glass. Profit after tax was £3.7 million in both years. The shareholders approved dividends of £20 million in 2024 and £6.5 million in 2025, the accounts say, and net assets fell from £26.8 million to £24.0 million.

The workforce tells the same story as the revenue. Average staff rose from 79 in 2019 to 107 in 2023, then fell to 88 in 2024 and 84 in 2025. That is a gain of five people over the six years since the award, against the 106 new jobs the project promised.

Why Europe Should Care

Aluminium is one of the raw materials the EU now treats as a supply risk. The agreed text of the Critical Raw Materials Act put aluminium, with bauxite and alumina, on both its strategic and its critical lists, according to the law firm Watson Farley & Williams, and the European Commission's Raw Materials Information System lists aluminium and bauxite as critical. Recovering clean aluminium from bottle caps that would otherwise be downgraded is a small but direct contribution to that goal, and OMR's report tied the project to the EU's target of recycling 65% of municipal waste.

The strategic case for this particular grant was weaker than it looked. The plants that were meant to carry the technology into Benelux, Iberia, Germany and France never came, so the EU-funded capacity sits in Cheshire, outside the Union. And the company that received the grant was already a profitable, growing recycler whose profits rose more than twentyfold in the following three years for reasons its own accounts attribute to glass, not metals.

The Verdict

Recresco and BA Glass have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.