Coca-Cola Amatil has entered a Heads of Agreement with resource management leader Veolia Australia and New Zealand to potentially establish a recycling plant in Australia. It would focus on recycling PET plastic but excludes labels and caps.
Coca-Cola Amatil group managing director Alison Watkins said the two companies had established a joint project team to consider the feasibility, size, scale and location, end-to-end requirements and integration into both Amatil and Veolia’s value chains for the potential plant.
Veolia Australia and New Zealand CEO and managing director Danny Conlon said he was delighted to be working with Amatil on the important initiative.
“It comes at a critical time for Australia where we need to be doing more to resolve ongoing issues around plastics and their potential to be recycled. I look forward to future announcements on circular economy solutions,” said Conlon.
Amatil recently announced it was on track to meet its 2019 sustainable packaging goal, with seven out of 10 plastic bottles made from 100 per cent recycled plastic.
The company has further cut its plastics use by another 50 tonnes a year as a result of electricity sub-metering in bottle production. It has also cut annual carbon emissions by 67 tonnes and reduced the company’s power bills by $14,000.
Amatil’s Australian beverages managing director Peter West said the company had worked with the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage to install electricity sub-meters for each of its resin-drying subsystems at the Eastern Creek bottling facility in Sydney.
“We’re a major user of plastic resin in bottling, mostly involving recycled plastic. We shape this resin into bottle preforms at Eastern Creek in Sydney. The resin must be dried to a low moisture content before it’s reshaped,” said West.
“All our preform machines have dryers to dry the resin but we identified that drying time varied enormously across machines – from as low as a few hours to over 20 hours.
“Using sub-metering means we could pinpoint these specific drying times and make sure the team calibrated machines to meet the need.”
“As a result of lower materials loss, we’ve cut our total plastic use by 50 tonnes a year from this action alone. That’s a good commercial outcome, and another step forward for sustainability.”
