Alpla continues to pursue growth-through-acquisition strategy

Austria’s Alpla Group has acquired the recycling company Texplast from the Fromm Group and all of its shares in the joint venture PET Recycling Team Wolfen, the company has announced. All 125 Texplast employees will retain their positions under the new ownership.

As a result, the Alpla has become one of the largest PET recycling companies in Germany, with an annual processing volume in Germany of 75,000 tonnes of PET bottles.

Texplast was founded in 1992 and produces PET pellets and flakes from used PET bottles. The pellets are primarily used for preforms for new PET bottles, with the coloured PET flakes being used by packaging manufacturer Fromm to produce packing strap. Increasingly, however, the focus shifted towards the bottle-to-bottle cycle in recent years.

PET Recycling Team Wolfen specialises in the recycling of PET bottles from the ‘yellow bag’ – German bin for household recyclables. The sorting and processing systems at Texplast’s site in Wolfen, which are unique worldwide, were set up in 2019.

In early 2021, the Alpla Group announced that it would invest an average of €50 million a year until 2025 in the ongoing expansion of its recycling activities. In particular, it plans to globalise its activities in the area of high-quality recyclates in order to close the materials cycle in as many regions as possible.

In October 2021, therefore, Alpla first acquired BTB Recycling, in Bad Salzuflen, a bottle-to-bottle recycler with a processing capacity of 20,000 bottles a year. The present deal adds another 55,000 tonnes of PET input annually processed in Germany by the company.

In total, the annual production capacity of Alpla’s recycling companies, joint ventures and collaborations amounts to approximately 203,000 tonnes of rPET and 74,000 tonnes of rHDPE. Alpla currently operates recycling plants for PET and HDPE in Austria, Germany, Poland, Mexico, Italy and Spain. Other projects are being carried out in other places around the world.

‘Our goal is the cycle from bottle to bottle. We are stepping up our activities worldwide to meet growing demand for post-consumer recyclate. This investment will strengthen our position in the German market and guarantee high quality and availability of the material for our customers,’ said Alpla CEO Philipp Lehner.

The acquisition was officially finalised on 25 February 2022. The parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price or any further details. The acquisition is subject to the legal and regulatory approval of the competent competition authorities.