Austrian packaging manufacturer Alpla (Hard; www.alpla.com) said it has invested more than EUR 5m in an extrusion system for 15,000 t/y of food-grade rPET at its site in Anagni / Italy.

Alpla’s plant in Anagni currently processes around 50,000 t/y of PET for the production of preforms, with only a very small proportion of this currently made using recycled material. The new extrusion system, which is scheduled to be operational by second half of 2021, is expected to change that by giving customers the option of sourcing preforms made partly or entirely of rPET. This will also create 10 new jobs at the Anagni site.

“We will buy PET flakes made from used household packaging from local recyclers, process them into food-grade rPET and then use this at the site for preforms,” said Fabio Mazzarella, the plant manager in Anagni. He noted that production of the recycled material near the processing operations offers attractive synergies in logistics and warehousing and possibly even for energy.

Georg Lässer, head of corporate recycling at ALPLA, said, “We want to promote the bottle-to-bottle cycle and avoid downcycling. In addition, we would like to boost local recycling solutions in a region that does not have the necessary infrastructure for the bottle loop.”

At the start of May 2020, PET Recycling Team (PRT, Wöllersdorf / Austria; www.petrecyclingteam.com), a subsidiary of Alpla, had doubled its capacity for rPET, to 30,000 t/y, in Radomsko / Poland (see Plasteurope.com of 25.05.2020).