Packaging expert Alpla Group is far more than packaging alone. Alpla has long established itself in the market as a partner for PET recycling. The company has been a joint-venture partner in a PET recycling plant in Mexico since 2005; it has since invested in the construction of a PET recycling plant in Radomsko, in southern Poland, acquired BTB Recycling in 2021, and in 2022 announced it was taking full ownership of Texplast, a company based in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, and of the joint venture PET Recycling Team Wolfen.
As well, in 2019, the company also moved into HDPE recycling, with the purchase of two Spanish recycling plants in Montcada i Reixac and in Venta de Baños.
The investment has been worth it, says Alpla, at least in terms of greenhouse gas emission reduction. According to the results of a study from c7-consult, an independent business consultancy focusing on life cycle assessments, climate and sustainability, tasked with calculating the carbon footprint of the rHDPE at Alpla’s plants.
The study conclusively demonstrated that investing in recycling activities made sense. The rHDPE produced in Montcada was found to have a carbon footprint of 0.24 kg of carbon equivalents per kilogram - an 88% reduction compared to virgin HDPE, which has a footprint of 1.92 kg of carbon equivalents per kilogram.
For the rHDPE produced at Venta de Baños, this was 0.28 kg of carbon equivalents per kilogram, putting it 85 per cent lower than virgin HDPE. The analysis took into account the separate collection and sorting of post-consumer HDPE bottles, for the most part in Spain, their shipment to the Alpla recycling plants, and their being washed and processed into rHDPE pellets. The two plants currently have an annual capacity of approximately 25,000 tonnes of rHDPE.
One important step in recycling HDPE is colour sorting, the company said. Sorting the HDPE waste into separate colour streams keeps packaging in the loop for a longer time: turning yellow HDPE into yellow rHDPE, white into white, red into red or blue into blue, for example, reduces the use of colour pigments, while additionally preventing commingling and therefore also ‘greying’ of the material.
Alpla intends to continue on this investment path in the future, said Günther Lehner, Alpla Chairman. In 2018, the company signed the Global Commitment of the New Plastics Economy, an initiative of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and committed to spending a total of 50 million euros to expand its recycling activities up to 2025. Alpla has since significantly increased this investment target. From 2021, an average of 50 million euros a year will be specifically earmarked for recycling. Moreover, the company’s packaging solutions are all to be fully recyclable by 2025 - and the proportion of processed post-consumer recycled materials is to rise to 25 per cent of total material usage by that same year.