With four acquisitions and the construction of a new plant in under three years Aloxe (Amsterdam, The Netherlands; www.aloxe.one) has catapulted itself right to the forefront when it comes to PET recycling in Europe. In the small French municipality of Messein near Nancy, the company that Clément Lefebvre and Arnaud Piroëlle founded in 2020 recently commissioned a plant with a pellet capacity of 35,000 t/y PET.

This has boosted its total capacity to 120,000 t/y, spread across plants in Italy and Poland, in addition to France. This should make Aloxe the largest independent PET recycler in Europe.

Aloxe has invested EUR 25 mn in the conversion of existing buildings in Messein and the installation of two new Vacunite bottle-to-bottle lines from Erema (Ansfelden, Austria; www.erema.com). Older recycling systems from the nearby town of Vézelise – at Loreco Plast Recyclage which was acquired in 2021 – are to be added by the end of 2023, bringing capacity at Messein to 50,000 t/y. Thirty new jobs are to be created in the process.

Since founding the company, Piroëlle and Lefebvre have been on a spending spree through Aloxe Holding. Both have decades of experience in the plastics sector – Piroëlle at BASF and Lefebvre most recently as vice president Polymers at Veolia (of all companies), given that the French waste management group is closing its PET recycling plant in Rostock at the end of 2023 due to the business environment being too volatile. 

The idea for Aloxe developed against the backdrop of the European Union’s single-use-plastic (SUP) directive, which aims to increase the recyclate content of PET bottles in Europe to 25% by 2025 and 30% by 2030. “We realised,” the two company founders are quoted as saying in the French media, “that the market was not at all prepared for something like this” and that customers would be forced to place orders with many different recyclers of disposable PET bottles in order to obtain larger quantities.

Aloxe, by contrast, intends to ensure a pan-European presence and sufficient volumes – aided by the financial resources of US investor Ara Partners (Houston, Texas; www.arapartners.com), which is also investing in other recycling groups including Recycled PE AT Scale BV (Repeats; Amsterdam; https://repeats-group.com).

Aloxe says it aims to boost its current sales of some EUR 35 mn to EUR 220 mn by 2024. The group will have seven plants by then, compared to the four it has at present. These include the acquisitions of Elcen (Gdynia, Poland; www.elcen.eu) and the recycling subsidiary of Italian mineral water bottler Ferrarelle Società Benefit (Cosenza, Italy; www.ferrarelle.it), with a plant in Presenzano, and also a production facility under construction in the Polish town of Wąbrzeźno in conjunction with Ergis Recycling, the PET recycling division of Ergis (Warsaw, Poland; www.ergis.eu).

The Aloxe founders put the current installed capacity for PET recyclate in Europe as a whole at 850,000 t/y, compared with an estimated demand of 1.3 mn t in 2025.