Alina Oprea • 10 May, 2023 at 8:01 AM
Austrian manufacturer of plastic packaging Alpla, in partnership with Romanian company Ecohelp and Swiss company United Polymer Trading (UPT), has officially inaugurated a PET recycling unit in Târgu Mureș. The investment amounted to €7.5 million while work lasted nine months.
The plastic recycled at the factory in Târgu Mureș will be used for the production of new PET bottles. The plant will produce approximately 18,000 tons of recycled material from household waste per year.
The facility will also supply the South East European market with food-grade rPET (post-consumer recycled).
Ecohelp operates, through the company Professional Recycle, a PET packaging sorting and recycling unit in Târgu Mureș, with over 80 employees. The Romanian company will contribute to the mixed project with the raw material, namely PET flakes, which will go through an extrusion process to produce granules of recycled PET (rPET).
Alpla will contribute as a recycling specialist and producer of preforms and PET bottles, and UPT will deal with the marketing of recycled and processed materials. Alpla, previously announced that it will invest, on average, €50 million annually to increase plastic material recycling activities until 2025.
Alpla has 190 production units in 46 countries, of which 66 are in Europe. The group has about 23,000 employees and an annual business of about €4 billion.