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Recy­cled HDPE with an excel­lent carbon footprint

rHDPE causes up to 88 per cent fewer CO₂ emis­sions than virgin material

Hard, 5 May 2022 – Recy­cled HDPE (rHDPE) from the Spa­nish recy­cling plants Sum­inco in Mont­cada i Reixac and in Venta de Baños, which belong to the ALPLA Group, causes up to 88 per cent fewer carbon equi­va­lent emis­sions than virgin mate­rial. This fin­ding of an ana­lysis per­formed by the inde­pen­dent busi­ness con­sul­tancy c7-consult once again unders­cores the importance of recycling.

Recy­cling pla­stic pack­a­ging has been an inte­gral part of ALPLA’s sus­taina­bi­lity stra­tegy for more than 25 years.The global manu­fac­turer of pla­stic pack­a­ging always advo­cates a closed pack­a­ging loop in accordance with the bottle-to-bottle prin­ciple. Recy­cling plays a key role in this, giving value to used pla­stic pack­a­ging. Having long since estab­lished a name for itself glo­bally as a partner for PET recy­cling on the basis of its own recy­cling plants, the com­pany addi­tio­nally moved into HDPE recy­cling in autumn 2019 when it purchased the two Spa­nish recy­cling plants.

To unders­core the importance of recy­cling in the area of HDPE too, ALPLA com­mis­sioned c7-consult, an inde­pen­dent busi­ness con­sul­tancy focu­sing on life cycle assess­ments, the cli­mate and sus­taina­bi­lity, with cal­cu­la­ting the carbon foot­print of rHDPE (recy­cled HDPE).

rHDPE signi­fi­cantly reduces carbon emissions
The result illus­trates once again why it pays to con­tinue to invest in recy­cling acti­vi­ties – the rHDPE pro­duced in Mont­cada has a carbon foot­print of 0.24 kg of carbon equi­va­lents per kilo­gram. This equates to 88 per cent fewer green­house gas emis­sions than virgin HDPE, which has a foot­print of 1.92 kg of carbon equi­va­lents per kilo­gram. The rHDPE pro­duced in Venta de Baños like­wise has an excel­lent foot­print of 0.28 kg of carbon equi­va­lents per kilo­gram, put­ting it 85 per cent lower than virgin HDPE. The ana­lysis covers the sepa­rate coll­ec­tion and sorting of post-consumer HDPE bot­tles (pri­ma­rily in Spain), their ship­ment to the ALPLA recy­cling plants, and their being washed and pro­cessed into rHDPE pel­lets. The two plants curr­ently have an annual capa­city of appro­xi­m­ately 25,000 tonnes of rHDPE.

‘The saving of up to 88 per cent CO₂ with rHDPE in com­pa­rison to virgin mate­rial con­firms once again that our invest­ments in our global recy­cling acti­vi­ties are worth it. We wish to con­tinue on this path in the future too.’
Gün­ther Lehner, ALPLA Chairman

Colour sorting offers addi­tional advantages
When it comes to recy­cling HDPE, ALPLA focuses in par­ti­cular on colour sorting. This main­tains high-quality HDPE recy­cling streams, pre­serves colour streams and keeps pack­a­ging in the loop for a long time. Tur­ning yellow HDPE into yellow rHDPE, white into white, red into red or blue into blue, for example, reduces the use of colour pig­ments, while addi­tio­nally pre­ven­ting com­ming­ling and the­r­e­fore also ‘greying’ of the material.

This enables ALPLA to meet many of its cus­to­mers’ mar­ke­ting requi­re­ments and pro­duce many examples of coloured pack­a­ging using sus­tainable recy­cled mate­rials. This goes hand in hand with important mea­sures in the area of design for recy­cling which aim to accom­mo­date the com­plete recy­cla­bi­lity of a pro­duct already at the con­cept deve­lo­p­ment stage.

ALPLA inves­ting in the cir­cular economy
In 2018, ALPLA signed the Global Com­mit­ment of the New Pla­s­tics Eco­nomy, an initia­tive of the Ellen Mac­Ar­thur Foun­da­tion, and com­mitted to spen­ding a total of 50 mil­lion euros to expand its recy­cling acti­vi­ties up to 2025. ALPLA has since signi­fi­cantly increased this invest­ment target. From 2021, an average of 50 mil­lion euros a year will be ring-fenced spe­ci­fi­cally for recy­cling. In addi­tion, all pack­a­ging solu­tions are to be fully recy­clable by 2025 and the pro­por­tion of pro­cessed post-consumer recy­cled mate­rials is to rise to 25 per cent of total mate­rial usage by this time.

Infor­ma­tion for editorial
ALPLA, Lukas Oes­terle (Sus­taina­bi­lity Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Manager), tel.: +43 (0)5574 6021 2132, email: lukas.oesterle@alpla.com
Pzwei. Pres­se­ar­beit, Joshua Köb, tel.: +43 (0)5574 44715 22, email: joshua.koeb@pzwei.at