Pact Group wins Circular Economy Award for milk bottle recycling efforts

Integrated plastic packaging manufacturing and recycling company Pact Group has won the Circular Economy Award at this year’s Chemistry Australia Industry Awards for its efforts to recycle the equivalent of half a billion used milk bottles a year and turn them into new milk bottles.

According to a Dairy Australia report, Australians are consuming, on average, around 90 L of milk each year on a per capita basis, which equates to more than a billion 2 L plastic milk bottles.

To combat dairy plastic wastage, used milk bottles and other dairy containers are collected from household recycling bins and then processed at the Pact-operated Circular Plastics Australia (CPA) recycling plant in the Melbourne suburb of Laverton.

The CPA facility can recycle up to 20,000 tonnes of used high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) packaging each year at full operational capacity. This equates to around half a billion 2 L milk bottles.

The facility uses state-of-the-art equipment to sort, shred, wash, sanitise and dry the material before converting it into high-quality food- and non-food-grade resins.

The recycled resin will be used at Pact’s packaging manufacturing facilities in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, which are being upgraded to enable an increase in the use of recycled content used to make HDPE milk bottles and dramatically reduce the need for virgin plastic.

This award recognises the significant efforts Pact Group is making to recycle used plastic packaging from Australian households to create new packaging which in turn can be recycled.

Top image credit: iStock.com/Yevhen Roshchyn