PETpla.net Insider 12 / 2011

MATERIAL / RECYCLING 16 PET planet insider Vol. 12 No. 12/11 www.petpla.net South Africa’s PET recy- cling efforts are being driven Petco, a non-profit industry body. The country’s recy- cling rates have nearly quadrupled since it was established in 2004. The ‘flower of Africa’ is the ironic name given to discarded plastic waste, including bags and bottles, which litter the countryside and has reached a critical level in parts of the continent. South Africa’s PET waste consists mainly of plastic bottles and the coun- try’s PET industry established Petco seven years ago as a non-profit organi- sation. It is charged with the respon- sibility for the facilitation and recycling of PET, and to minimise its impact on the landscape. Since 2004, PET plastic recycling has grown from 9,840t to 37,842t in 2010, and 3 million PET bot- tles are now recycled each day. These recycling rates have been achieved by Petco in partnership with service providers Extrupet, Kaymac and Sen Li Da, who combine collection, recycling and end-use in their PET value chain. Local reuse and recycling South Africa has an advantage over other African countries because almost all of the post consumer PET bottles collected are recycled within the country for end-use, rather than being exported to China. The con- sequence of the growing collection of post-consumer PET bottles is that end-use markets have the opportunity to expand and develop. The largest end-use market for post consumer PET bottles in South African is cur- rently the fibre market (bottle-to-fibre). More recently, there is installed capac- ity for post consumer PET bottles, to be recycled into new PET contain- ers (bottle-to-foodgrade). B2FG resin take-up is, however, currently rela- tively slow and Petco is working with retailers and brand owners to increase the demand for PET recyclate. Discarded post consumer PET bottles are collected, baled and deliv- ered to the recycler – unfortunately, however, many of these are still col- lected from landfill. In the recycling plant, PP bottle tops are removed and the bottles are inspected and sorted according to colour, with any non-PET items being removed. The sorted bottles are then granulated into flakes, which go through numerous hot and cold washes before ultimately arriving in a flotation basin for final separation of non-PET material. PET has a higher density than other plas- tics, except PVC, and will sink while other materials, such as paper from labels, rises to the top and floats. The Products made of recycled PET