Photo courtesy of PZWEI.
Austria-based ALPLA and Switzerland-based Fromm say they are investing €7 million ($7.86 million) into a facility in Wolfen, Germany, designed to sort and recycle PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic scrap harvested from German household gelber sack (yellow bag) collection programs.
The alliance, known as PET Recycling Team Wolfen, was announced in 2018. Texplast, a subsidiary of Fromm Plastics GmbH, is in the process of installing a third extrusion line at the Wolfen location, which will begin operating in May and increase the annual capacity for food-grade rPET by 15,000 metric tons.
What started as a more informal partnership has become a joint venture in which the partners have agreed to invest the €7 million in sorting and processing systems at the Texplast facility in Wolfen. “The competition approval was granted, and the implementation should begin in 2019,” according to a Team Wolfen press release.
“We want to process the clear bottles from the yellow bag in such a way that the material can be used in the production of new bottles,” says Georg Lässer, head of recycling at ALPLA. “We create flakes out of the colored PET for use in the manufacture of strapping bands,” he adds.
Team Wolfen indicates there is “a huge backlog” for other forms of PET packaging, such as trays (including fruit trays and packaging for sausage and cheese, thermoforming films, blister packs and memory cards.
“The investment creates the conditions for further developing the recycling process for these items on an industrial scale in collaboration with the film industry,” says Matthias Schäfer of Texplast. “In this way, we also play an important role in achieving legal recycling targets. We also thus ensure that we can continue to produce our PET strapping bands from 100 percent recycled materials.’
ALPLA describes itself as a leading plastic packaging company with more than 20,000 employees worldwide. The Fromm Group produces load securement systems, including strapping, for the transportation of goods and has more than 1,200 employees on six continents
Texplast GmbH is a Fromm subsidiary with more than 100 employees and, with an input capacity of more than 50,000 metric tons of scrap bottles per year. It describes itself as one of the leading recyclers of rPET in Western Europe.