TRADE SHOW REVIEW PETplanet Insider Vol. 24 No. 07+08/23 www.petpla.net 35 Interview with Dr Karl Hagspiel, Senior Circular Economy Expert at Alpla Plastic packaging solutions and recycling services by Heike Fischer Alpla, a plastic packaging specialist, with 23,300 employees and 190 production facilities in 46 countries worldwide, has reached a PET recycling capacity of 266,000 t in its several recycling plants worldwide. Further growth expected! PETplanet spoke to Dr Karl Hagspiel, Senior Circular Economy Expert at the PRSE trade fair in Amsterdam about Alpla’s recycling and sustainability strategy and the current challenges in the rPET market. PETplanet: Alpla has been active in plastic recycling since the 1990s. At that time, a 1,000ml plastic bottle for Lenor was made from PCR material. Thirty-three years have passed since then. Recycling is now the heart of a circular economy. What does circular economy mean to Alpla? Hagspiel: The circular economy is a central theme at Alpla. Because, as the name suggests, it’s about keeping the material in the cycle or loop for as long as possible. Together with the also very important topic of Design for Recycling (D4R), we at Alpla try to keep polymers at the highest possible level of recycling. But our contribution with focus on plastics is only one part on the way to a closed loop instead of the currently prevailing linearity in the global economy. For our part, we are trying to fulfil our responsibility by producing only 100% recyclable packaging from 2025, offering a wide variety of reusable bottles, and steadily increasing recycling capacity - for both PET and HDPE - worldwide to obtain high-quality recycled material we produce ourselves and thereby guarantee availability to our customers. PETplanet: Last year, Alpla developed Austria’s first modern PET returnable bottle for the mineral water company Vöslauer. Could you briefly outline the key data of the project and explain why Vöslauer decided on this type of returnable packaging? Hagspiel: The returnable PET bottle for the Vöslauer mineral water brand was the first modern returnable PET bottle for the Austrian market. In principle, we develop reusable packaging because our customers want and demand it and because we believe that this will be a big market in the future. For the project with Vöslauer, we were able to draw on our long experience in this field, because we have already been producing a returnable PET pool bottle for the Genossenschaft Deutscher Brunnen (GDB Association of German Mineral Springs) in Germany for many years. And we also have various sizes of returnable PET bottles in use for Coca-Cola in Central America. The reusable PET bottle for Vöslauer is a 1-litre bottle that, at just 55 g, is around 90 per cent lighter than the glass alternative. This alone reduces the CO2 footprint by around 30 per cent. The bottle is made entirely of recyclable PET monomaterial with a recycled content of around 30 per cent. This is to be continuously increased over the years. With twelve cycles, the bottle is expected to remain in use for around three to four years. From an climatic point of view, the investment is already worthwhile when it is first used. At Vöslauer, the introduction of refillable PET will save around 420 t/a of CO2 . This actually answers the question of why Vöslauer decided to use this type of reusable packaging. F.l.t.r.: Dr Karl Hagspiel, Senior Circular Economy Expert at Alpla and Casper van den Dungen, Vice President Plastics Recyclers Europe at the PRSE in Amsterdam 2023
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