09-10 Nov, 2009 - Mexico City, MEXICO
Camino Real Santa Fe
Camino Real Santa Fe
PetStar’s state-of-the-art bottle-to-bottle recycling facility in Toluca, Mexico will produce more than 48 million pounds of food-grade resin annually. The plant which held its grand opening in April this year, plans to double its capacity in two years. It is the largest Bottle to Bottle PET Recycling plant in Latin America.
The US$35 million plant can recycle over 64 million pounds of recycled PET annually, or nearly 1 billion bottles, enough volume to fill a football stadium. PetStar aims to integrate and use over 90% of the volume processed to add value and produce a solid state recycling PET resin that they aim to sell domestically.
In an interview with PlasticsNews.com, PetStar’s Director-General Jaime Camara said, “Our aim is to do closed-loop recycling in Mexico, turning PET bottles back to food-grade resin that we can sell back to soft-drink and water bottlers to make new bottles”.
He added that bottlers plan to produce bottles with 10-25 percent recycled content, using Petstar’s recycled resin.
Coca-Cola USA in a separate statement says it plans to boost the recycle content of its PET bottles to 10 percent by the end of 2010, increasing to 25 percent in 2015.
In addition to the recycling facility, Petstar is also running an innovative social-responsibility program, which will help improve the welfare of informal laborers and reduce the incidence of child labor in the waste sector.
Petstar is part of Houston-based recycling services company Avangard Innovative Ltd. Its wholly owned subsidiary, Avangard Mexico SA de CV will supply the plant with raw material. Avangard Mexico started collecting PET bottles in Mexico since 1995, and is the largest collector of Post-Consumer and Post-Industrial plastics in Latin America.
Mexico occupies second place worldwide (behind the US) in PET consumption, using 750,000 metric tons yearly. About 17% of all MexicanPET is collected for recycling (compared with 24% in the US). Up to 2008, about 75% of Post Consumer PET was exported out of the country to USA, China and India for fiber production.
Mexican Recycling Industry (IMER), a joint venture of Coca-Cola de Mexico, bottler Coca-Cola Femsa and converter ALPLA, opened the first bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in Mexico in 2005.
Across the border in Spartanburg, USA, Coca-Cola has a joint venture with United Resource Recovery Corp. LLC for a bottle-to-bottle recycling plant, the biggest in the world which opened in 1 Feb 2009. Its capacity will reach 100 million pounds in 2010.
Along with Petstar, a senior representative from Coca-Cola will be present at 7th LAPET to talk about PET and their sustainability initiatives.
Be sure to sign up for 7th LAPET conference in Mexico City on 9-10 November 2009 to network with PET industry majors. Register online now or contact Ms. Jaime Ng at +65 6346 9145 or email at jaime@cmtsp.com.sg.
