The life cycle of a PET bottle
The Coca-Cola Company and Mpact Polymers see a world without waste.
The Coca-Cola Company recently conducted a tour of the Mpact Polymers recycling plant in Wadeville, followed by a tour of South Africa’s biggest bottling plant, owned by Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa (CCBSA) in Olifantsfontein.
The tour was designed to take you on a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle’s journey, demonstrating its life cycle, the recycling ecosystem it undergoes to become recycled PET (rPET) and its journey back into the manufacturing and packaging processes.
Mpact believes a plastic bottle is not trash and should not be thrown in the bin along with other rubbish.
John Hunt, managing director of Mpact, who was instrumental in ensuring there is a functioning recycling plant in Wadeville, advocated for recycling, saying it was brilliant for creating small local businesses and changing lives.
“Mpact has helped create 45 businesses in local Gauteng townships.
“Recyclers have joined a community that generates an income, adding economic value and saving the environment all at once,” said John.
“Recycling is one of the effective ways of creating jobs for people who do not have any particular skills or education.”
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Mpact has a laboratory on site which tests the pellets for any deformities.
In the laboratory, the supervisor, Mingaye Hare, and her team ensure the intrinsic viscosity (IV) of the pellets and the virgin PET are the same so they can blend well to create a preform.
To create a preform they dose 10 per cent of the rPET into virgin PET.
At the bottling plant, preforms are blown into the desired size and undergo the packaging process.
Future plans for Mpact and Coca-Cola entail turning recycling into a prerequisite as the main concern still remains recovery.
Bottles are mainly recovered from landfill sites and not households.
“Design is an important part of getting our message across and if we advocate for design, we need to do away with coloured PET bottles and come up with innovative ways to make plain bottles look appealing.
“Improving and expanding our recycling messaging on all labels, as well as getting into the habit of design for sustainability and making recovery easier is all part of our strategy,” said Dr Casper Durandt, the franchise technical director for Coca-Cola.
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Alongside design, collect and recycle, partnering with various entities to bring relevant policies and awareness around recycling is part of their ‘A world without waste’ strategy to invest in large scale recycling by 2020 and see them produce 100 per cent recyclable packaging by 2025.
The recycling plant is where the rebirth of a used PET bottle begins before it is transported to bottling plants to once again hold beverages.
Phase One:
Recyclers collect PET bottles, quality sort them and compact them using baling machines which allow them to efficiently transport the goods to recycling plants.
The bottles filter through a machine that has a magnet which removes any metal. The metal is recycled elsewhere.
Phase Two:
In the second part of the process sand and dirt are separated from the bottles.
Phase Three:
Labels are removed, to be recycled later.
Phase four:
At a high speed near infrared cameras the bottles are scanned over multiple levels, sorted according to colour, and type of plastic.
Phase five:
The sorted bottles are ground into tiny flakes.
Phase six:
The flakes are sucked up and whisked into a separator which removes light fractions such as residual labels.
Phase seven:
The flakes are washed thoroughly over three stages and other plastic types such as bottle caps that were caught up with the flakes are removed and recycled elsewhere.
Phase eight:
The flakes pass through a metal detector prior to being sorted by a laser scanner with ultimate precision to pick only the best.
Through a number of processes which are all enclosed to ensure everything remains hygienic the flakes are progressively heated as they are prepared to be useable PET again.
Phase Nine:
After the best PET has been chosen, the flakes are melted, extruded into strands and chopped into tiny pellets.
Phase 10:
These pellets move across vibrating screens that keep their temperature constant before being sent into dryers where they’ll later be cooled and ultimately bagged as rPET ready to be made into a preform.
Mpact has a laboratory onsite which tests the pellets for any deformities.
In the laboratory, the supervisor Mingaye Hare and her team ensure that the intrinsic viscocity (IV) of the pellet and the virgin PET are the same so they can blend well to create a preform.
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