Recycling egg shells, what a cracking idea!
Award winning hard-boiled egg manufacturer Just Egg Ltd has teamed up with the UK’s largest producer of custom colour masterbatch plastics to develop a bio-filler produced from crushed egg shells.
Just Egg Ltd, which operates in the East Midlands and supplies hard boiled eggs, egg mayonnaise and other egg related products to retailers and sandwich makers, has been working for a number of years for an innovative and ecologically sound way to discard egg shells.
Founder Pankaj Pancholi has been working with scientists at Leicester University to help find a solution to stem the costs of sending millions of eggs to landfill every year.
Just Egg Ltd deals with more than 60m eggs and sending them to landfill costs around £50,000 per year. Egg shell is made of calcium carbonate, similar to chalk, with a hard-wearing, crystalline structure.
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Researchers at Leicester University, led by Prof Andy Abbott, found that egg shells could be used as a bio-filler for plastics, which led Mr Pancholi to present the findings at a conference in London last year where he met Silvergate Plastics.
Silvergate manufactures colour, additive and multi-component masterbatches that improve production processes, enhance the performance of end applications and maintain brand integrity.
Silvergate agreed to take in crushed and cleaned egg shells from Just Egg Ltd, and process them into filler for masterbatch, which can be used in any application.
The egg shells replace traditional filler and help reduce the amount of ground polymer used in the masterbatch formulation. The ground-breaking bio-filler can be used to create any colour, including black.
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