A consortium of six international companies involved in the manufacture, use, collection and recycling of PET packaging has formed to work on developing chemical recycling technology for opaque and difficult-to-recycle PET waste. The members are energy and petrochemicals producer BP (London / UK; www.bp.com), packaging specialist Alpla (Hard / Austria; www.alpla.com), food, drink and consumer goods producers Britvic (London; www.britvic.com), Danone (Paris / France; www.danone.com), and Unilever (Rotterdam / The Netherlands; www.unilever.com) as well as German recycler Remondis (Lünen; www.remondis.de).

One aim is to drive the commercialisation of BP’s “Infinia” depolymerisation technology, which is designed to convert PET waste into recycled feedstocks that can be used to make new PET packaging. BP plans to build a USD 25m pilot plant at its R&D hub in Naperville, Illinois / USA in 2020 to test the Infinia technology – see Plasteurope.com of 06.11.2019.

More than 75% of PET bottles that are collected globally are recycled, but only 12% of those collected are used in the production of a new PET bottle, based on calculations by BP of data from Wood MacKenzie (Edinburgh / UK; www.woodmac.com). The remaining collected PET bottles are “downcycled”, that is, reused in a non-bottle application and then sent to landfill or incinerator.

Each member company intends to combine their capabilities to speed up commercialisation of the Infinia technology and develop the infrastructure, supply chain and demand requirements needed to process hard-to-recycle PET bottles and food trays. Other parties may join the consortium in the future to complement the expertise of the founding members.