Australia recently opened its largest PET recycling plant ever. Called Circular Plastics Australia PET, the new facility in Albury-Wodonga, New South Wales is a joint venture partnership between Pact Group, Cleanaway Waste Management Ltd, Asahi Beverages, and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) aiming to develop a circular solution for post-consumer PET beverage and food packaging.
Circular Plastics Australia (CPA) plans to recycle 30,000 tonnes of post-consumer PET collected via container deposit schemes and kerbside recycling each year into food-grade rPET pellets for use in new beverage bottles and other food and beverage packaging. The project’s four partners each have a specific role in the initiative: Cleanaway supplies the plastic to be recycled through its collection and sorting network, Pact operates the facility and provides technical and packaging expertise, while Asahi Beverages, CCEP and Pact buy the recycled plastic from the facility to use in their packaging.
The output of the Albury-Wodonga plant will help to increase the amount of locally sourced and recycled PET by two thirds from around 30,000 tonnes to over 50,000 tonnes p.a. and reduce Australia’s reliance on virgin plastic and recycled plastic imports. Pact’s managing director and CEO, Sanjay Dayal, called the opening the facility in Albury-Wodonga a ‘game changer for Australia’s plastic recycling industry.’
“Working together with our partners, this facility creates a true circular economy by recycling and manufacturing PET beverage bottles and food packaging here in Australia without the need to import plastic material from overseas,” he said.
The CPA Albury-Wodonga facility was supported by an AUD 5 million grant through the New South Wales Government’s “Waste Less, Recycle More” initiative, with the support of the Australian Government’s Recycling Modernisation Fund, and is equipped with a state-of-the-art recoSTAR PET 215 HC iV+ PET bottle-to-bottle recycling line from Starlinger that produces 2.5 tonnes of food-grade rPET per hour.
The process starts with a two-stage heating and drying process of the hot-washed flakes for optimum preparation for the extrusion process. After extrusion, thorough filtering and underwater pelletising, the produced rPET pellets undergo vacuum treatment in the downstream SSP reactors for IV increase and highly effective decontamination that readies the pellets for food-contact applications.
CPA is building a second PET recycling facility in Altona North in Melbourne, Victoria, which will be equipped with a Starlinger recoSTAR PET 330 HC iV+ recycling line featuring the largest SSP reactor currently installed worldwide. It will have the capacity to recycle the equivalent of around one billion PET beverage bottles each year. Construction has been scheduled to begin in April 2022 and be completed in 2023.
Starlinger recycling technology is a division of Austrian-based Starlinger & Co GmbH. For more than 30 years Starlinger recycling technology has been providing machinery solutions for the recycling and refining of a wide scope of plastics such as PE, PP, PA, PS, BOPP and PET. Starlinger PET recycling systems produce food-safe rPET and are approved for use in food applications.