PETpla.net Insider 09 / 2015

MATERIAL / RECYCLING 16 PET planet insider Vol. 16 No. 09/15 www.petpla.net Recycling PET into pellets based on an article by Dr. Thomas Friedlaender, Krones AG and Mr Jean Renson, Krones AG Belgium It’s a spring-water empire: Cristaline is France’s best-selling packaged water. Behind this brand is the Groupe Alma con- glomerate, behind which, in turn, is one man: Pierre Papil- laud, who in his Roxpet subsidiary has commissioned the second MetaPure PET bottle-to-bottle recycling line from Krones, for making food-grade PET pellets to be re-used in container production. These are the first two Krones lines of their kind, which serve to make not flakes but pellets. A variety of different processes id Krones PET recycling are on the market. In Bangladesh, Akij Food & Beverage Ltd. is operating a bottle- to-bottle recycling line from Krones where used and pre-sorted PET bottles are turned into food-grade flakes, which serve to make pre- forms: bottle-to-bottle. In Japan, FPCO also runs a Krones recycling line to produce food-grade flakes from old PET bottles. These, how- ever, serve primarily to make food- grade films used by the company as packaging for ready-to-cook meals and fresh foodstuffs as well, and are turned into preforms and new PET containers only as a secondary benefit. Food-grade pellets from non-food-grade flakes The French Roxpet company in Lesquin, a suburb of Lille, not far from the Belgian border, is adopting a dif- ferent approach: it purchases non- food-grade flakes from a neighbouring plastic recycling facility, cleans them so as to render them food-grade, and makes them into pellets, which are then directly used for preform produc- tion to make PET containers. This is the first recycling line from Krones where the end product is pellets, not flakes. Consequently, the process sequence in some steps deviates from the one familiar in the bottle-to- bottle recycling lines Krones has built so far. Roxpet is the PET-recycling sub- sidiary of the French Groupe Alma, which operates quite a few bottling plants for mineral and spring water: 36 in France, two in Italy (Courma- yeur and Contursi), plus one each in Spain (Aquadeus) and Luxem- bourg (Beckerich). The euphonious, prestigious names of the French mineral waters are very well-known the whole world over, most of them belonging to multinational conglomer- ates. However, the market leader in the French water segment, with its impressive per-capita consumption of around 135 litres, is not to be found among them. It is Groupe Alma, with its Cristaline brand. And the majority shareholder is a man who has built up this group for more than 50 years: Pierre Papillaud. “I’m very proud of my life and of what I’ve achieved”, says Papillaud. “I grew up as a farmboy in Saint-Émilion, the world- renowned wine-growing village to the east of Bordeaux. I was running around barefoot until I was seven. When I was 24, that was in 1959, I hired four employees and started to fill spring water and soda, at 600 bot- tles an hour. And it was from these RECYCLING S P E C I A L