Rostock: Plastic Recycling Plant

Recycling Plastic:  A Goal Everyone Shares

Europe’s plastics manufacturers would like to find ways to extend the life of their products indefinitely. Their aim for the year 2020 is to prevent any plastic from going to landfills. It’s a goal shared by numerous European Union countries that have established incentives and requirements for recycling plastic packaging in particular.
 

Rostock:  A Model Factory For Recycling PET

Germany is among the most advanced countries when it comes to recycling, and in the city of Rostock, Veolia is converting 1 billion plastic bottles each year into granulate used to make new bottles. Once the bottles are collected and transported to the processing centre, the bottles are pre-sorted by color and their caps and any residual waste are removed. The bottles are then ground into flakes and subjected to a hot wash and a mechanical-chemical recycling step (Hybrid-UnPET process by URRC) in order to achieve food-grade plastic flakes. After being purified and packed into bags, these PET flakes can be delivered to manufacturers of plastic bottles and turned into ”new” PET bottles. 

The benefits are striking:  more than 31,000 metric tons of oil and thousands of cubic meters of water are saved each year through this process, while reducing costs for the supply and transportation of raw materials. 

The US Food and Drug Administration, Switzerland’s Federal Office of Public Health, Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute as well as the EFSA and similar organisations have certified that these recycled products fully comply with the principal regulations governing food contact materials in the EU and the US. 

In other words, a water bottle recycled by Veolia can be reused safely to hold a beverage. That’s a major step forward in social responsibility that has always (and rightly) enshrined the precautionary principle and prevented the use of recycled materials for direct food packaging.

Benefits for our client

• A guaranteed process
• Health safety
• Improved waste recovery
• Lower processing costs
• Significant carbon footprint reduction
• Increased potential for recovery of packaging