Building packaging management systems

Bottle-to-Bottle PET recycling

A new €15 million Bottle-to-Bottle recycling plant in Austria began operations in 2007. It is jointly owned by Coca-Cola Hellenic and four other beverage manufacturers.

The plant is capable of recycling an estimated 20,000 tonnes of used PET bottles each year. It produces the highest standard of food-grade PET flakes, which are made into preforms and blown into new bottles.

This closed loop process ensures a cost-effective and available supply of food-grade PET, which will allow recycled content in the new Austrian PET bottles to reach 30 per cent.

Austrian Minister of Environment Josef Pröll described the business model as ‘the perfect solution for the environment, the economy and the consumer’.

Packaging recovery in the Czech Republic

In 2002, EKO-KOM , a Czech recovery organisation, was launched to reach national packaging collection and recovery targets.

By 2006, it had designed and implemented a separate collection scheme that was recovering 70 per cent of packaging waste. It took Germany over a decade to achieve such results.

EKO-KOM studied which packaging materials were predominant in the waste stream and created separate collection bins for each one, with a colour and cartoon character to distinguish them.

These formed the basis of education campaigns, which were conducted at various stages of implementation; first targeting proactive recyclers, then the less interested and finally the reticent.

Municipalities are responsible for placing and emptying the collection bins and EKO-KOM pays them for each ton of material they collect.

Bonus schemes are also used as incentives to, for example, place more bins. As a result, collection points are, on average, only 140m from each household in urban areas.

 Learn more about our packaging and recycling initiatives.

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