Australian industrial supplier Pact Group has formed a joint venture (JV) with Cleanaway, Asahi Beverages and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners to build a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling facility in Altona North, Victoria.
The partnership comes after the companies signed a memorandum of understanding for the JV in August last year.
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The plant is estimated to cost around $50m and will be built on an industrial area on Horsburgh Drive.
The project is expected to create more than 100 local jobs during its construction phase, as well as 45 permanent jobs upon its completion.
Construction work on the facility is scheduled to begin early this year, with the facility due to be completed next year.
Pact Group CEO and managing director Sanjay Dayal said: “We know from our research that Australian consumers are increasingly demanding packaging that is recycled and recyclable, and this new PET recycling facility in Victoria ticks both of those boxes.
“This facility is part of our ongoing investment in new state-of-the-art facilities to recycle plastic waste and manufacture sustainable packaging all across Australia.”
The recycling facility will be the second to be built by the JV after the Albury-Wodonga plant, which is due to be fully operational next month.
Both plants will make use of advanced sorting, washing, decontamination and extrusion technology.
Each facility will have the capacity to process almost one billion plastic bottles and convert them into more than 20,000t of recycled PET bottles and food packaging a year.
The bottles will be collected through container deposit schemes and kerbside recycling.
Asahi Beverages Group CEO Robert Iervasi said: “Our consumers can now have increased confidence that when they dispose of their plastic water or soft drink bottle, it will be recycled instead of going to landfill.
“It’s not every day that drinks companies announce they’re building a new recycling plant but we want to help create meaningful change.”
