RECYCLING company Environmental Waste Controls (EWC) is floating on London’s Alternative Investment Market to fund its expansion plans.

Knowsley-based EWC, which offers waste management services to the public sector and to hundreds of private firms, hopes to raise £4m from its stock market placing.

That cash will help it to fund its growth plans, including opening more recycling centres around the UK.

EWC, which employs 370 people, operates household waste recycling centres for seven UK local authorities.

Its Commercial Waste Management division collects and sorts waste from companies across the UK.

In the year to last August, EWC posted sales of £23.8m, with a pre-tax profit of £2.1m.

EWC’s chief executive, Bill Shaw, said the placing would also help raise the company’s profile and would give it the financial clout to bid for bigger tenders.

He said: “We’ve got a fairly aggressive business plan to grow our organisation quite rapidly. Being quoted has a lot of benefits. There’s a kudos in being quoted. It will help us by giving us more credibility when we bid for tenders.

“Being a quoted company makes it easier to attract talent, and that’s something we’re keen on.”

EWC plans to open three more large Material Recycling Facilities (MRF) centres, which sort waste that would otherwise go to landfill and then sell it other recyclers. It already has MRF sites in Knowsley, Neath Port Talbot and London.

It has bought land in East Kilbride, near Glasgow, and is now going through the planning process before opening a site there. The company also plans to open a site in Leicester and another in London.

Mr Shaw said: “Recycling is a growth area, and with green legislation and financial penalties for landfill, it will continue to be a growth area.

“To get the most benefit from waste, you need space to sort it.

“MRFs give us the space to operate in. They enable us to do different things with waste.

“For example, we deal with several hundred tonnes of copper wire, covered in plastic, a year. We traditionally sold it to a commodities dealer for about £1,800 a tonne.

“But we invested in our MRF in Knowsley – we bought a wire stripper. We now have a couple of guys who, as part of their weekly work, strip the wire.

“We can now sell the plastic at £200 a tonne and the copper at £5,500 a tonne.”

Mr Shaw says EWC is considering opening further MRF centres.

“One place in the country where there is a dearth of recycling facilities is the West Midlands,” he said. “If we’re going to have a seventh site, it will be there.”

Mr Shaw, who left for London yesterday to take part in a series of investor roadshows, said he expected EWC to be well-received in the City.

“It’s a cash-generative business,” he said.

“We’re not convincing people to invest in a complex process with long lead times.

“The whole nature of the business is that it’s very simple. It’s easily understandable. It’s something you see in action.”