Pact Group has picked up the prestigious Circular Economy Award at the 2024 Chemistry Australia Industry Awards.
Pact Group was awarded the honour for its efforts to recycle the equivalent of half a billion used milk bottles a year and turn them into new milk bottles.
The used milk bottles are collected from household recycling bins and processed at the Pact-operated Circular Plastics Australia (CPA) recycling plant in the Laverton, Melbourne. 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 reduce the need for virgin plastics.
Australians currently consume about 90 litres of milk each year on a per capita basis, which equates to more than two billion 2L plastic milk bottles, so the initiative is a major boost for the domestic circular economy.
Recycled plastic is 2.2 times less emissions intensive than virgin fossil fuel plastic so by providing high-quality, local, recycled content for commercial use, Pact is enabling a lower emissions circular economy solution.
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