Austrian packaging company Alpla and Swiss packaging equipment supplier Fromm Holding AG are strengthening their recently-formed recycling partnership with plans to expand production at Texplast, a German subsidiary of Fromm.
The two companies, who both operate recycling plants for PET bottles, announced their recycling “collaboration” in July, which involves working on the distribution of PET waste among their recycling units.
In a statement on 20 Dec, the Alpla announced the two companies were deepening the partnership by adding an extrusion line at the Texplast site in Wolfen, Germany and supplying the rPET materials to Alpla.
As part of this, Texplast is currently building a new production hall, which will house its new 15-kilotonne-per-annum (ktpa) extrusion line, increasing its annual capacity for food-grade rPET to 27 ktpa. The €4.5m facility is expected to become operational in April 2019, according to Texplast.
The food-grade rPET will then be use by Alpla to produce beverage bottles, particularly for the German market.
“The demand for recycled plastics is continuously increasing…. With Texplast as a partner, we have access to high-quality recyclable material in the German market,” said Georg Lässer, head of recycling at Alpla.
According to Matthias Schäfer, Texplast representative, the partnership with Alpla has optimised logistics, and therefore reduced the carbon footprint to “as small as possible”.
“We recycle the returnable goods from the food retail industry and turn them into high-quality, food-safe granulate from which Alpla produces preforms for new PET beverage bottles. The colourful flakes created in the process are used by Fromm for its in-house strap production,” he added.
Alpla and Fromm have not disclosed details of their collaboration but say the agreement would see their recycling sites complementing each other.
Alpla runs PET Recycling Team plants in Wöllersdorf, Austria and Radomsko, Poland. Combined, the two facilities have an annual capacity of approximately 45,000 tonnes of food-grade rPET produced from post-consumer materials.
Fromm Plastics GmbH owns Texplast PET recycling facility in Wolfen, Germany, which produces PET pellets and PET flakes.