Indorama Ventures highlights sustainability achievements

Chemical company Indorama Ventures Public Co. Ltd. (IVL), headquartered in Bangkok, has released its 10th annual “Sustainability Report,” which it says celebrates a decade of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling and carbon reduction milestones. As a global company operating in 33 countries, the report is available in 15 languages.

“Our efforts in embedding sustainability throughout IVL for over a decade has enabled us to achieve responsible growth while ensuring business resilience through unprecedented times,” Aloke Lohia, group CEO, writes in the message that opens the report.

The company issued its first "Sustainability Report" in 2011 and says it has grown its sustainability initiatives under the pillars of People, Planet and Prosperity. Using 2013 as a baseline, IVL says it achieved a 10 percent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity, 4 percent reduction in energy intensity and 7 percent reduction in water intensity. It also increased total waste diverted from landfill from 48 percent to 84 percent in 2020. Additionally, IVL’s global PET recycling capacity has improved almost 100 times from 3,576 tons per year in 2011, when IVL first entered the PET recycling business, to more than 330,000 tons per year in the second quarter of 2021.

Throughout the decade, IVL says it has voluntarily adopted international standards for its sustainability reports, resulting in recognition by sustainability ratings agencies such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices and the Morgan Stanley Capital International.

When it comes to recycling, Udey Paul Singh Gill, the company’s chief strategy officer, writes, “We believe that a collaborative approach can have a wider impact and are therefore working closely with industry associations such as NAPCOR (National Association for PET Container Resources), the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, as well as recycling collaborations with our key customers. We are also working with several technology providers, our feedstock suppliers and customers to continuously improve the quality of our products and services including advanced recycling solutions. We remain focused on developing an all-inclusive circular economy in part by educating students, teachers, communities and other enablers to positively influence consumer behavior in support of a circular economy ecosystem.”

He adds that the company has pledged to invest an additional $1.5 billion to increase its recycling capacity to 750,000 tons of postconsumer bottles to reach 50 billion bottles per year by 2025.

In 2020 IVL says it recycled 10.1 billion PET bottles and is on track to recycle 50 billion bottles per year by 2025. The company says its global reach and leadership position as the world’s largest PET and recycled PET resin producer allow it to leverage a closed-loop system.

In 2020 IVL invested in three additional recycling facilities, and in 2021 the company acquired CarbonLite’s recycling assets in Texas.

“One of the biggest challenges the planet faces today is the mismanagement of plastic waste,” Yash Lohia, IVL chief sustainability officer, says. “IVL’s ambition is to end PET plastic waste through recycling. We started our recycling journey in 2011, and in the decade since then we have recycled approximately 65 billion PET bottles. Our recycling initiatives will drive the circular economy and play an important role in our long-term sustainability ambition.”

In addition to mechanical recycling, IVL is exploring chemical recycling technology. According to its “Sustainability Report 2020,” “In a partnership with start-up Ioniqa and Unilever, we are pioneering a new technology that converts PET waste back into virgin grade material for use in food packaging. Through Ioniqa’s innovative chemical recycling process, nonrecycled PET waste, such as colored bottles, are broken into the base molecule level, contaminants are removed, and the molecules are converted back into PET at virgin grade quality.”

More information is available from the Sustainability Report Center on IVL website.