PETpla.net Insider 12 / 2018

PET news 6 NEWS PET planet Insider Vol. 19 No. 12/18 www.petpla.net And & Or new facilities opening On November 16, And & Or officially opened its new 2,000m 2 plant in the Parque Empresarial Guadalquivir, Seville, Spain. This expansion intends to meet And & Or’s machinery and solutions growing demand for all the markets where the company currently operates. The specialisation and subdivision of the production phase depending on the product type has been the key force to achieve an efficient and sustainable growth in the past years, with the aim of improving the quality of the service provided to our customers, states the company. The facility will be specialised in the manufacture of machines for assembly and quality control: linear and rotative handles appli- cators, liner cap insertion, rotative leak testers, taps lines and other special machines. With this expansion, And & Or will result in a total surface area of 11,500m 2 between both production plants, the spare parts storehouse and the offices. www.andyor.com 50% rPET: new target for bottles with the RAL quality mark The use of recycled material in disposable PET bottles is expected to increase significantly in the coming years. This has been decided unanimously by the RAL quality association for the recycling of recy- clable PET drinks packaging e.V. By 2022, PET beverage packaging with the RAL quality mark will consist of an average of 50% recycled PET material. As a result, the organisation wants to further close the recycling cycle and increase the sustainability of beverage packaging. The minimum recyclate rate of 25% to obtain the quality label will remain. After the weight and material consumption of disposable PET bottles has steadily dropped in recent years, the Gütegemeinschaft sees the increase in the recycling percentage in PET bottles as the key to sustainable development. Against this background, it has for- mulated the goal that all bottles bearing the RAL quality seal should have an average of half recycled PET by 2022. The members of the Gütegemeinschaft, including preform manufacturers, beverage producers and recyclers, unanimously supported the implementa- tion. With the target, the RAL Quality Association complies with the requirements of the German Packaging Act, which comes into force on January 1, 2019. This aims to promote the recycling of beverage packaging in closed circuits. www.wertstoff-pet.de Nestlé Waters North America signs agreement with recycled PET supplier CarbonLite Nestlé Waters North America announced that it has signed an agreement with recycled PET plastic (rPET) supplier CarbonLite, and that CarbonLite will expand its U.S. operations by building a third facility in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania. The new contract builds upon Nestlé Waters’ existing relation- ship with CarbonLite, one of the largest producers of food-grade, post-consumer rPET, and allow the beverage company to further expand use of recycled materials in its packaging. The company currently purchases rPET from CarbonLite’s existing facilities in California and Texas. CarbonLite anticipates the facility will be in full production by early 2020, and will have the ability to recycle over 2 billion post-consumer bottles a year. The new 200,000-square-foot processing facility is anticipated to save 60,000 t of carbon annually by using post-consumer materials and produce 80 million pounds per year of food-grade rPET pellets. Nestlé Waters, which has two bottling facilities in the Lehigh Valley, uses recycled plastic in a number of its brands including Nestlé Pure Life and Deer Park which are bottled locally. The company has been increasing the amount of rPET it uses in its packag- ing since 2011, and in February 2018, Nestlé Waters launched a 700ml Nestlé Pure Life bottle made of 100% rPET. In California, all of the company’s single- serve sizes of Arrowhead Brand Mountain Spring Water and Nestlé Pure Life bottles produced in the state are made with 50% rPET. Nestlé Waters’ parent company, Nestlé SA, is a signatory of the recently announced New Plastics Economy Global Commit- ment. An initiative of The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and UN Environment, the “Global Commitment” is an agreement to ensure that 100% of plastic packag- ing can be reused, recycled or composted by 2025. www.nestle.com Athena changes name to Niigon Machines Ltd. Athena Automation Ltd., a company manufac- turing injection moulding machines near Toronto, Ontario, announced that it is changing its name to Niigon Machines Ltd. “This allows us to emphasise our business objective of becoming a global leader in customised injection moulding machines” said Robert Schad, Chairman. “Niigon is an Ojibwa word that means ‘for the future’.” www.niigonmachines.com