recycling

ALPLA has acquired a property in Toluca, capital city of the State of México in the country’s centre. Construction of a state-of-the-art recycling plant will commence on it in autumn 2020, with its launch planned for the second half of 2021. The amount invested is roughly 15 million euros and 65 jobs will be created. The company will be run as a 100-per-cent subsidiary of ALPLA, while the facility will have an annual capacity of 15,000 tonnes of HDPE recycled material for non-food applications, for example for packaging solutions for personal care or household cleaning products.

By working together, the two organisations can provide sustainable fibre based packaging solutions that will replace hard to recycle packaging made from combined materials such as cardboard and plastic.

The Digital Watermarks Initiative HolyGrail 2.0 is seen as the next iteration of the initial HolyGrail project under the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. It is now a pilot project with the objective to prove the viability of digital watermarking technologies for accurate sorting and consequently higher-quality recycling, as well as making the the business case for large scale implementation.

ALPLA switched its PET Recycling Team plants in Wöllersdorf, Austria, and Radomsko, Poland, to a mix of electricity from renewable sources in order to produce carbon-neutral rPET (= recycled polyethylene terephthalate). ‘This step has already had a big impact on the carbon footprint of our food-grade regranulate – according to the calculations, emissions are cut by up to 90 per cent compared with virgin material. The feedback from the market regarding this further development has been very good,’ explains Georg Lässer, Head of Recycling at ALPLA.

“We have made significant strides on our journey to use more sustainable packaging,” said David Tulauskas, Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer of NWNA. “Bottles made with other bottles – like these – provide tangible proof that recycling works and the circular economy for plastics is achievable.

The Coalition will work to cement polypropylene’s status as a standard curbside recycling material through projects that enhance collection, sorting and processing in recycling facilities to increase the value and supply of recycled polypropylene (rPP), and reduce the need for virgin plastic used in packaging. According to a statement from Keurig Dr Pepper, this sponsorship supports the company’s broader efforts to reduce its plastic footprint.

To advance the sustainability features of its toothpaste tubes, Henkel uses Albéa’s proprietary Greenleaf tube technology, which enables the packaging to be fully recyclable wherever collection schemes are active. Greenleaf tubes are recognized by the Association of Plastic Recylers (USA) and Suez.Circpack (Europe) as technically recyclable within the existing, effective HDPE bottles recycling stream. What’s more, the unique tube-making technology uses a single-blown film, thus significantly reducing the product’s CO2 footprint.

HolyGrail 2.0 is a pilot project facilitated by AIM, the European Brands Association, with the objective to prove the viability of digital watermarking technologies for accurate sorting and, consequently, higher-quality recycling. The project also aims to demonstrate the business case for digital watermarking at scale. It builds on initial research by Amcor’s partner, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, into innovations to improve post-consumer recycling.

In response to the urgent need for plastic waste management, Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) in partnership with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) positively impacted more than 33,000 households across three wards of Mumbai – K-East (Andheri East), H-West (Bandra West) and R-North (Dahisar) – through a plastic waste material-recovery model. The project will be scaled to include more households in the coming years.