PET producer Novatex Ltd. has expanded its product portfolio by investing in bottle-to-bottle recycling of collected post-consumer PET bottles. “By producing bottle-grade recycled PET we want to support our partners PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and others to meet their circularity targets. The produced rPET has all the necessary food-contact certifications and is being used by all major brands. In addition, the government of Pakistan is pushing hard to eliminate single-use plastics and plastic waste,” said Rizwan Diwan, CEO at Novatex Ltd.
With the new Starlinger bottle-to-bottle recycling system, Novatex is able to produce up to 3,000 kg of food-contact rPET per hour, which amounts to an annual production output of more than 24,000 tons. Novatex sources the post-consumer PET bottles mostly from municipal kerbside collection across Pakistan.
The produced rPET chips are used in the company’s own PET preform production or sold on the local and international market. Pakistan does not yet have a national mandatory recycled content quota for plastic packaging comparable to the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR); thus, brand owners—in Pakistan mainly PepsiCo—are leading the path for rPET inclusion.
Roadmap to reduce plastic waste
Studies and surveys estimate that Pakistan generates around 3.12 million tons of plastic waste annually, of which only 4 to 9 percent is recycled. With plastic use increasing by 15 percent annually—largely driven by single-use products—and plastics making up almost 40 percent of the solid waste in the Indus river, the country is confronted with environmental and public health challenges.
