September 17 (SeeNews) - Austrian plastic products manufacturer Alpla said that it has set up a joint venture with Romania's Ecohelp and Switzerland's United Polymer Trading (UPT) for the construction of a PET recycling plant in Romanian central city of Targu Mures - a 7.5 million euro ($8.8 million) investment project.
Production at the new plant is scheduled to begin in mid-2022, Alpla Group said in a press release on Thursday.
The joint venture company, PET Recycling Team Targu Mures, is subject to regulatory approval by competition authorities. The plant expansion will create 15 new jobs at the site in Targu Mures.
"Our aim at Alpla now and in the future is to establish a bottle-to-bottle cycle – including in regions in which the collection and recycling of waste still has potential for development. By participating in this joint venture, we are taking a strategically important and sustainable step in this direction," Alpla chairman Günther Lehner said.
The three companies are each investing equally in the installation of an extrusion line to recycle post-consumer PET bottles, aiming to produce 15,000 tonnes of food-grade post-consumer recycled PET (rPET) each year. The rPET granulate produced in Targu Mures will then be used to manufacture new preforms and bottles, with an intention to strengthen the local materials cycle within the region of central and southeastern Europe.
"We are seeing consistent growing demand from our customers for recycled material, and this demand is worldwide and unbroken. It and our customers’ need to close local material cycles give us an opportunity to boost investment projects like these," Alpla head of corporate recycling Georg Lässer said.
Alpla will act as a recycling specialist and a preform and bottle manufacturer, whereas Ecohelp will supply the base material in the form of PET flakes that will go through an extrusion process to produce high-grade rPET granules. UPT in turn co-owns the rPET Upcycling facility Cumapol Emmen in The Netherlands and specialises in trading plastics and recycled material.
Alpla is an Austrian, international acting plastics manufacturer headquartered in Hard, specialising in blow-moulded bottles and caps, injection-moulded parts, preforms and tubes.
($=0.8489 euro)