PETpla.net Insider 10 / 2017

EDITOUR PET planet Insider Vol. 18 No. 10/17 www.petpla.net 18 Tour Sponsors: An interesting topic in the drinks industry is shelf life. In various con- versations with fillers, we heard unanimously that a greater stockage of drinks in wholesale and retail, as well as in the population at home is unusual and products generally go directly onto the shelves and are consumed in the short term. This makes preform and bottle types with several layers or bar- riers generally obsolete. Besides an understandable lack of willingness to invest in corresponding technologies, the constant temperatures likewise reinforce a lack of necessity for such expensive packaging. In addition there is a particularly price-sensitive popula- tion in rural areas. Outside of the urban areas, there is a large market, in par- ticular for extremely lightweight, cheap bottle types. Overall the growth for PET in Thailand lies at around 8%. Current PET consumption is around 390,000t annually, of which around 90% of material is processed into bottles and 10% into PET sheets. The overall revenue from 352,000t of PET is split into 46% bottles for water, 24% CSD, 13% juices and various RTD applica- tions, 7% cooking oils, 6% personal care and homecare products and 4% (liquid) food. New applications, such as PET shells and PET cans for food prod- ucts, are meanwhile slowly gaining in importance, and this was confirmed time and again by our interview part- ners. There has also been a rise in 5-gallon water bottles made of PET. Besides the drinks and food indus- tries, there is also a clearly growing need for PET packaging for beauty and health products. Indorama is at the forefront of local material generation and conver- sion and it shares the market with Shinkong and Thai PET Resin in terms of materials, and with Propet, Precision Plastic, Taiwan Hon Chuan and Srithai on the conversion side. Get in touch with… recycling Thailand In Thailand, recycling is basically still in its infancy, so all types of rub- bish usually come together unsorted and separation is made of only a few exceptions. Here and there are companies and households that sort their recyclables but on the whole, these are individual cases and are mostly restricted to the urban areas. The main causes lie in a lack of awareness amongst the population about the right way to handle rub- bish, and available resources. A lack of infrastructure to carry out recycling on a larger scale does the rest. One industry expert we met estimates that it could still take up to 20 years of PET recycling before there could be talk for example of bottle-to-bottle. During our analysis of Thailand, we also visited one lone campaigner for PET bottle recycling, Royal Interpack, and the situation there once again highlights the status quo: a new high-tech facil- ity with German equipment is carry- ing out services but, because of the restricted availability of local material, has to import PET bottle bales from overseas so as to use the system to full capacity. Get in touch with… PET & local trends Laos The main problem in Laos, as in Cambodia, is that there are currently no valid figures or data for the drinks and packaging markets and their consumers. On location in Vientiane, for example, we spoke to the larg- est beer producer, Beer Lao, which is not only the market leader with its three factories and its product lines of beer, CSD and water, but is also one of the largest companies in Laos, also bottling for Pepsi. Here too however, there was no adequate market data to be found and the difficulties of the local market in terms of consump- tion and packaging were confirmed once again. What we do know though, as already mentioned in the country introduction, is that all sectors are growing strongly and a main factor for this is the predominantly young generation. The turmoil and new beginnings that the Laotian economy experiences are bringing the typi- cal middle-class scenarios onto the table; as we already know from other countries, this is primarily an interest in new, more expensive products and an increasing awareness of health- ier foods. With a view to the drinks