An alcohol trading firm is teaming up with hospitality businesses across the North West in a drive to help make the industry more environmentally friendly.

WDS Group, based at Peel Mills Industrial Estate in Bury, is a beer, wine and spirits wholesaler and distributor.

And for 14 years, it has been working to minimise its carbon footprint by operating a zero-landfill model and aiming to fully recycle all of its trade waste.

The business is now working with hospitality businesses across Manchester, Cheshire, Lancashire, North Wales and Yorkshire to make it more environmentally friendly.

The group supports the beverage industry across the North West to be more sustainable and during its deliveries to pubs, bars, cafés and restaurants it collects empty KeyKegs that may otherwise end up as landfill.

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KeyKegs are sustainable, designed-for-circularity beer, wine and other beverage kegs, produced by the firm OneCircle.

Once empty, the kegs can be processed to recover the raw materials used to produce new KeyKegs.

WDS Group joined OneCircle's Return Partner Network in early 2019 and has already collected 65 tons of empty Kegs for recycling.

During last summer alone, it collected 10,000 empty KeyKegs.

The firm has had a steady stream of businesses approach them to create a circular economy - where materials are reused.

And as more kegs are collected, the amount of circular material in each new KeyKeg will steadily increase, conserving precious natural resources.

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One of the businesses WDS works with is Reserve Wines in Manchester, which imports wine sustainably, direct from wineries in Italy, France, Spain and Portugal.

Shipped in lightweight KeyKegs to reduce the environmental impact, the fresh wines are served in reserve wines’ bars and decanted into reusable bottles in its shops.

WDS Group collects up to 100 empty KeyKegs per month from Reserve Wines.

Nic Rezzouk, a buyer for Reserve Wines, said: “With help from WDS Group we are able to make closed-loop recycling a success — we could not have achieved it alone.

“Our future focus is wine on tap, so with WDS Group and KeyKeg we can serve high-quality, delicious-tasting wines and be sustainable.”

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WDS crush and bundle the empty KeyKegs for OneCircle to collect.

OneCircle then shreds, separates and sorts the different plastics on an automatic recycling line to recover the raw materials.

As much recycled material as possible is used to produce new KeyKeg parts, while the remainder is recycled for other uses.

Sales director for WDS Group, Sam Evans, said: "We're happy to be part of KeyKeg closed-loop recycling, helping pubs, bars and restaurants return their empty kegs for recovery of the materials used to make new kegs.

“At WDS Group we want to continue collecting and recycling as many empty KeyKegs as we can to make a greater positive environmental impact in the region."

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