Plant recycles bottle-to-bottle

Food & Drug Packaging, April, 2002

A new recycling facility in Rostock, Germany, is introducing "bottle-to-bottle" technology that manufactures finished plastic bottle for export to Scandinavia entirely from waste plastic.

The $8.8 million dollar facility, with a recycling capacity of 15,000 tons of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, belongs to PET Recycling International GmbH, a subsidiary of England's Cleanaway. It opened at the beginning of March.

Germany manufactures about 5 billion PET bottles a year and will collect about 600,000 tons of plastic packaging for recycling. By contrast, the U.S. collected about 775,000 tons of plastic bottles for recycling in 2000, the latest year for which figures were available from the American Plastics Council. That figure does not include other forms of plastic packaging besides bottles.