Closing the loop on beverage container plastics
The Circular Plastics Australia Plastic Recycling Facility is a joint venture between Cleanaway, Asahi Beverages, Pact Group and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) to develop a plastic pelletising facility. The first facility is located in Albury-Wodonga to service customers across the East Coast and commenced operations on 11 March 2022. A second PET plastic recycling facility based in Melbourne’s west began construction in April 2022 and is scheduled to be completed in 2023.
The facilities enable the creation of a circular economy by utilising the expertise of each participant while closing the loop on plastic beverage container waste. Cleanaway provides the feedstock from our collection and sorting network, while Pact provides the technical and packaging expertise in the facilities. Asahi Beverages, CCEP and Pact will buy the recycled plastic pellets to be used in their packaging products.
Key features
The Albury-Wodonga facility is expected to recycle approximately 1 billion PET plastic bottles annually after commencing operations in March 2022. Work is underway on a second PET plastic recycling facility with similar capacity based in Victoria.
Both facilities are projected to be able to produce more than 20,000 tonnes of recycled PET bottles and food packaging each, making them the largest end-to-end rPET plants in Australia.
This will also increase the amount of locally-sourced and recycled PET produced in Australia by two-thirds – from the current 30,000 tonnes to an estimated over 50,000 tonnes per annum.
How we do it
Plastic beverage containers collected from container deposit schemes will be recycled and turned into plastic pellets, ready to be reused as new plastic packaging.