imprint EDITORIAL PUBLISHER Alexander Büchler, Managing Director HEAD OFFICE heidelberg business media GmbH Hubweg 15 74939 Zuzenhausen, Germany phone: +49 6221-65108-0 fax: +49 6221-65108-28 [email protected] EDITORIAL Kay Barton Heike Fischer Gabriele Kosmehl Michael Maruschke Ruari McCallion Anthony Withers WikiPETia. info [email protected] MEDIA CONSULTANTS Martina Hirschmann [email protected] Johann Lange-Brock [email protected] phone: +49 6221-65108-0 fax: +49 6221-65108-28 LAYOUT AND PREPRESS EXPRIM Werbeagentur | exprim.de Matthias Gaumann READER SERVICES [email protected] PRINT Chroma Druck Eine Unternehmung der Limberg-Druck GmbH Danziger Platz 6 67059 Ludwigshafen, Germany WWW www.hbmedia.net | www.petpla.net PETplanet Insider ISSN 1438-9459 is published 10 times a year. This publication is sent to qualified subscribers (1-year subscription 149 EUR, 2-year subscription 289 EUR, Young professionals’ subscription 99 EUR. Magazines will be dispatched to you by airmail). Not to be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. Note: The fact that product names may not be identified as trademarks is not an indication that such names are not registered trademarks. 3 PETplanet Insider Vol. 24 No. 05/23 www.petpla.net Dear readers, In Germany, there is a deposit of €0.25 on disposable PET bottles, so it is little wonder that over 98% of them are returned. Bottle return machines are located in supermarkets. Now, the Schwarz Group with its 4,000 supermarket branches has put its money where its mouth is and published its own life cycle assessment study on their rPET bottles. The Group recycles the returns into 100% rPET bottles that come in clear, green and blue colours. For years, their portfolio has included five bottling plants, two preform facilities, one of which produces caps, and two recycling sites in Germany. Following the latest expansion of their recycling plant near Aachen, the Schwarz Group can now recycle 100% of its 2.3 billion bottles using its own bottle-to-bottle material. As a leading advertising partner, the company was able to persuade the well-known presenter of the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” television programme Günther Jauch to explain the environmental benefits of disposable PET bottles compared to reusable glass /PET containers to the end-consumer. Videos on the https://diekreislaufflasche.de website are well worth watching also for the non-German speaking PET enthusiast. On average, PET bottles in Germany have a rPET content of over 44.8%. According to Coca-Cola, their own proportion is slightly higher at 52.5% (both are 2021 figures). However, of the high return rate of 98% only around 44% of rPET for bottles is produced during recycling outside the Schwarz Group, with the rest going into fibre, foil or thermal recycling. This means there is a lack of bottleto-bottle material for higher rPET content on the market. And so Tilmann Rothhammer, a management board member of the Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Company in Germany, argued in WiWo [‘Business Week’] on May 1, only two weeks after the launch of Günther Jauch’s promotional campaign, that “if a bottle is to become a bottle again then beverage producers must be allowed to purchase recycled bottle material at a preferential rate” and that “we want a pre-emptive strike on recycled disposable deposit PET bottles”. The short amount of time between the response and the use of the term “pre-emptive strike”, borrowed from language used by the military and police, suggests that the Schwarz Group took Coca-Cola by surprise with its Günther Jauch promotional campaign. Sometimes, the mid-tier sector operates faster than international multinationals. Yours Alexander Büchler (Sources: Life Cycle Assessment Study MEG – The Schwarz Group 2023; Coca-Cola Sustainability Report 2021; PET Forum 2022 and WiWo, [‘Business Week’] 1 May 2023).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTY0MjI=