PETpla.net Insider 10 / 2013

EDITOURS REPORTS 28 PET planet insider Vol. 14 No. 10/13 www.petpla.net manufacturers pushing their way on to the market and the time had come to re-orientate. At the beginning of the 1990s a chance meeting with an Argentine employee of the North American company WTE (Waste to Energy) from Boston came to the rescue. They had been one of the first in what was at the time a PET recycling market that was still in its infancy and they were enjoying a positive sales trend as virgin material was still highly expensive. The number of PET bottles coming on stream was nevertheless still too small for WTE, which led to the idea of obtaining the necessary bottles through Coca-Cola Femsa and Pepsi Argentina, something which, taking into account the high cost of Virgin PET at the time, continued to represent a lucrative business. This left only the question of the most appropriate way of handling the logistics when it came to packaging and despatch – and this is where Marcelino / Reciclar came in with the experience he had gained from decades of operating in the retail market. Reciclar offered their services and were finally awarded the contract. The service enjoyed a boom until the price of virgin PET fell from US$4 at the time to US$0.75 per kg and the Ameri- cans withdrew from business in Argentina. Reciclar’s factory premises: Erwin Auspitz (Commercial Director, right) and Kay Barton surrounded by tonnes of com- pressed PET bottles Reciclar subsequently made a definite decision in 1995 to enter the recycling business themselves and their first 360° customer, Coca-Cola Femsa, was already on board, so to speak, as a result of their previous cooperation. After lengthy negotiations both parties resolved to sell Coca- Cola‘s used and faulty bottles to Reciclar, but this was to be just the start and later on it became a side issue. Instead they concentrated on the thousands of bottle col- lectors with whom Marcelino was likewise familiar from his old days as a dealer and who untiringly picked up bottles day in and day out, selling these to dealers who in turn sold the bottles on in part-sorted bundles to Reciclar. The first machines, as Erwin Auspitz explains, still tended to be sim- pler own-builds, imports from China or used machines from Brazil. From the material the machines produced the first flakes which were then exported to China in a dirty state. At the time, the price for 1kg bottles was around US$0.40, a feasible selling price to China merely a meagre US$0.12. However, Reciclar, fired with ambition at the idea of recy- cling, became involved in the business and, at the end of the 1990s, obtained support from Coca- Cola Argentina for just over two years. According to Auspitz, Coca-Cola was very interested in embarking on a project which would involve collecting the bottles from the streets. Coca-Cola invested US$0.20 per kg of street bottles collected in the project. The target was 100t per month, a figure that, in those days, was regarded as a colos- sal challenge. Today Reciclar recycles around 2,000t of bottles per month, made up almost exclusively of collected bottles plus a small ProTec Polymer Processing GmbH Headquarters Stubenwald-Allee 9 64625 Bensheim/Germany Phone: +49 6251 77061-0 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.sp-protec.com Trendsetting solutions to upgrade your virgin and post-consumer polymers! Düsseldorf Oct 16-23, 2013 Hall 9, Booth D60 Erwin Auspitz in front of a real company work of art: a Christmas tree made from old PET bottles and closures