Pact Group’s efforts to recycle the equivalent of half a billion used milk bottles a year has seen the plastic packaging manufacturing and recycling company win the Circular Economy Award at this year’s Chemistry Australia Industry Awards.
Australians consume about 90 litres of milk each year on a per capita basis, which equates to more than a billion 2-litre plastic milk bottles. Recycling and converting these back into new milk bottles, as Pact does, is a boost for the domestic circular economy.
Used milk bottles and other dairy containers are collected from household recycling bins and processed at the Pact-operated Circular Plastics Australia (CPA) recycling plant in the Melbourne suburb of Laverton.
The CPA facility, which is a joint venture with Cleanaway Waste Management, opened earlier this year and can recycle up to 20,000 tonnes of used high density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) packaging each year at full operational capacity.
At the newly equipped facility, the post-consumer material is sorted, shredded, washed, sanitised and dried before converting it into high quality food and non-food grade resins.
The recycled resin will be used at Pact’s packaging manufacturing facilities in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth, which are being upgraded to enable an increase in the use of recycled content used to make HDPE milk bottles and dramatically reduce the need for virgin plastic.
Pact says recycling plastic not only helps divert used packaging from landfill but also contributes to lowering carbon emissions by replacing virgin resin produced from fossil fuels.
According to the Climate Impacts of Plastic Consumption in Australia report, recycled plastic is 2.2 times less emissions intensive than virgin fossil fuel plastic, so by providing high-quality, local, recycled content for commercial use, Pact says it is enabling a lower emissions circular economy solution.
