Pact Group's recycled packaging partnership with ALDI

Pact Group, a plastic recycler and packaging manufacturer, has partnered with ALDI Australia to supply recycled plastic packaging for some of the supermarket’s own-brand products, such as milk bottles, meat trays, fruit and vegetable punnets, beverage bottles and shampoo bottles.

The packaging will be manufactured in NSW, Victoria and Queensland using recycled PET and HDPE plastic resins.

Sanjay Dayal, Pact CEO, said recycled plastic that is properly manufactured and handled could be the key to building a successful circular economy in Australia.

Oliver Bongardt, ALDI Australia’s Managing Director Buying, said, “As one of Australia’s largest grocery retailers, we understand the important role we play in reducing our use of plastic and improving the circularity of our product packaging. We are pleased to be partnering with Pact to introduce more sustainable packaging options, which will accelerate progress towards our plastics and packaging commitments.”

The partnership represents an important step forward for both companies to achieve their sustainability goals.

Pact has set a target of eliminating all non-recyclable packaging it produces, aiming to offer an average of 30% recycled content across its packaging portfolio by 2025; while ALDI is aiming to reduce plastic packaging by 25% and include 30% recycled content in its plastic packaging by 2025.

Pact is investing more than $76 million in new packaging manufacturing equipment across its Australian operations in order to manufacture high-quality recycled packaging products with an increased amount of recycled plastic resin.

It is also expanding its plastic recycling capabilities with its joint venture partners. The Pact-operated Circular Plastics Australia (PET) recycling plant in Albury, NSW, has the capacity to recycle up to 1 billion 600 mL PET beverage bottles a year — around 20,000 tonnes of PET plastic.

A second facility with similar processing capacity is scheduled to open in late 2023. Both facilities are joint ventures between Pact, Cleanaway Waste Management, Asahi Beverages and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. The recycled PET resin from these facilities is used to make new beverage bottles and food packaging.

Construction is also almost complete on a mixed plastics recycling facility in Melbourne in partnership with Cleanaway, which will process about 20,000 tonnes of mixed plastic waste — the equivalent to half a billion HDPE plastic milk bottles and dairy containers a year.