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The terms recycled and recycling used in this article is not used in the strict sense of the word, in that there is no closed-loop process with the plastic. |
The value of the Visy group's PET plastics operations have been greatly enhanced by approval from the powerful Food and Drug Administration in the United States for the use of Visy's recycled PET plastic in food containers.
The breakthrough opens up a big market for the group's Victorian plastics recycling plant and has already attracted attention from foreign companies.
"We have been approached by a number of companies from overseas which want to adopt the technology, and we weren't planning to start the marketing campaign until October,'' Visy Plastics research and technology manager Edward Kosior said last night.
Up to now, recycled PET plastic had been approved for use only in non-food applications such as hoses, pipes or garbage bins, Professor Kosior said.
The FDA standards are written into Australian food packaging standards, so the US approval automatically opens up the Australian market.
Approval was given after an arduous two-year testing regime during which Visy proved that the process removed all contaminants, at least down to unmeasurable levels of less than 10 parts per billion, Professor Kosior said. While it was not the first process to be approved, he claimed it was the cheapest.
The process purifies the plastic and rebuilds it on a molecular level, allowing a recycled bottle to be recycled many times. While bottles could be made 100 per cent from recycled PET, Visy was likely to blend up to 50 per cent recycled material with virgin PET.
The approval has come at a time when oil prices, and therefore the cost of plastic feedstock, are high, making recycling much more attractive.
Professor Kosior said that only about 25,000 tonnes of the 80,000tonnes of PET produced in Australia each year were recycled, compared with about 50 per cent of all milk bottles.
He said an education campaign could help lift that rate to around 50 per cent - although he admitted it would not be easy, as a large proportion of PET bottles were used in the office or outdoors, away from the domestic recycling system.
Visy customers were expected to welcome the recycling process, as it would help them meet their own recycling covenants, Professor Kosior said.
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