At the start of May 2020, PET Recycling Team (PRT, Wöllersdorf / Austria; www.petrecyclingteam.com), a subsidiary of Austrian packaging producer Alpla (Hard; www.alpla.com), put a second rPET extrusion facility into operation at its site in Radomsko / Poland. The new facility doubles the location’s capacity for rPET to 30,000 t/y. PRT’s Radomsko workforce of 90 people previously produced 30,000 t/y of flakes from post-consumer material from Poland and neighbouring countries – 15,000 t of this was extruded into recyclate.

Georg Lässer, head of recycling at Alpla, said a key goal of the packaging group is the expansion of bottle-to-bottle recycling by 2025. The planned 30,000 t/y recyclate capacity from the Polish site is exclusively intended for use in packaging made by the company’s European customers. The new extrusion facility was manufactured by Starlinger (Vienna / Austria; www.starlinger.com).

In addition to the expansion, the plant now also runs entirely on renewable energy. According to calculations made by consulting company c7-consult, the production of 1 kg of rPET in Radomsko now emits only 0.27 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents, Alpla said.

Alpla also recently started the “Verpackung mit Zukunft” (packaging with a future) platform with six other representatives of the Austrian packaging value chain. Günther Lehner, CEO of Alpla, said the initiative is intended to “position Austria as a model country in terms of packaging sustainability in packaging” (see Plasteurope.com of 20.05.2020).