Amcor Successfully Develops New PET Recycling Process

Amcor PET Packaging Europe/Asia to invest 18 million euros to expand its recycling facility in Beaune, France, which currently recovers 46.2 million pounds of resin from 66 million pounds of post-consumer PET (equivalent to 600 million PET bottles) per year The expansion of the material at the Beaune plant is the result of a collaboration between Amcor PET Packaging and Buhler Technology Group. The new recovery system is world-class in its class, doubling the output of the German plant, significantly increasing the price-to-efficiency ratio. Amcor's annual production capacity of super-cycled food grade PET will increase from 13.2 million pounds to 33 million pounds. In addition, Amcor also installed a new 11 million pounds per year NuCycle resin production facility for non-food applications.

Amcor revealed that this advanced recycling technology can now even recover multilayer PET bottles. It is said that there is no such large-scale, high-quality factory for recycling PET in Europe.

In a ring extruder, the post-consumer PET material is dried and all other organic impurities are separated. After that, in a continuous solid-state polycondensation process, polyester is used to produce recycled pellets with the same properties as PET. Amcor PET Packaging materials have the world's top position in the production of PET materials. There are 51 factories in 20 countries, of which two are bottle-to-bottle recycling plants.