PETpla.net Insider 06 / 2020

MATERIALS / RECYCLING PETplanet Insider Vol. 21 No. 06/20 www.petpla.net 36 Alpla expands PET recycling plant in Poland Doubling rPET capacity A new rPET extrusion system went into operation in early May 2020 at the recycling plant PET Recycling Team in Radomsko, Poland. As a result, the capacity for rPET (PET regrind material) will be doubled from 15,000 to 30,000 tonnes per annum. In this article, Georg Lässer, Head of Recycling at Alpla, explains this new development. ‘A key target is the expansion of recycling activities by 2025.’ is the mantra running through every fibre of the Alpla organisation. At the end of 2018, the company signed the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment – an initiative of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation – which, amongst other things, commits to investing a total of 50 million euros in pursuit of this aim. “We take this voluntary commit- ment seriously and have initiated several international projects, such as the construction of a recycling plant in Thailand. We are also investing in the expansion and improvement of our existing recycling plants. We aim to process even more recycled mate- rial for the bottle-to-bottle cycle and make the production processes at our recycling plants more sustainable by means of modernisation.” explains Georg Lässer. New extrusion line in Poland At the beginning of May, a second rPET extrusion line went into opera- tion at Alpla’s PET recycling plant in Radomsko. The 90 employees at PET Recycling Team Radomsko produce 30,000 tonnes of flakes a year from post-consumer material. Of this figure, 15,000 tonnes a year have thus far been extruded to produce regrind material. With the new system, the capacity will increase to 30,000 tonnes a year. As a result, the company is dou- bling the capacity for high-quality rPET, which can then be fed back into the bottle cycle. Downcycling (e.g. the use of flakes to produce film or their deployment in the textile industry) will largely be avoided. Instead, 30,000 t of regrind material will now be used solely to produce new packaging units for European customers – in keep- ing with the bottle-to-bottle principle. What’s more, all the input material – known as ‘post-consumer material’ – also comes from Europe, i.e. from Poland and neighbouring countries. Recycling Special Quality check in the PRT Radomosko laboratory Grinding and washing devices