"Sustainability is fundamental to Pact’s strategic direction," the company states. This is not a string of words that look good on its website. It is Pact's M.O.
Pact Group won ‘Company of the Year (Manufacturing)’, at the annual ACQ Global Awards 2014, for “achievement, innovation and brilliance”. Those are three high words of praise and Pact Group has worked hard to earn them. The company has made itself the largest manufacturer in Australasia of rigid plastics packaging since it launched in 2002 and gains 76% of its revenue from everyday staple products.
Let’s look at “achievement” and “brllliance” in sustainability first. Sustainability is fundamental to Pact’s strategic direction. And its goal to fill everyday living with sustainable packaging solutions is being spurred by the company’s closed loop national infrastructure for hard-to-recycle packaging. This is managed by a dedicated Sustainability Services division called Sustainapac that supports Pact and its customers to create business opportunities from sustainable packaging solutions.
Sustainapac can calculate the complete environmental impact a product will have over its entire life cycle – from ‘cradle to grave’. It can also provide packaging assessments against APC requirements, packaging recycling assessments, sustainable packaging design, recycling program development and stakeholder engagement.
Pact’s national infrastructure for hard to recycle packaging includes:
- Plastic oil bottle collection and recycling
- Drum recycling and reconditioning
- IBC collection and reconditioning
- Agchem container collection and recycling (drumMUSTER)
- Customer collection programs
Pact is also one of the largest recyclers of resin in Australia and New Zealand. Pact collects clean industrial plastic scrap, breaks it down, granulates and extrudes it. The company then either returns the reprocessed plastic to the original source (“tolling”), sells it as graded plastic resin or processes it into plastic sheet products that save substantial costs in materials handling, e.g. slipsheets, underground utility protectors (cable covers) and other customised products.
And now, let’s look at sustainable "innovation". The average Australian drinks 106 litres of milk each year; the average Kiwi, 81 litres. So Pact Group secured the exclusive licence for an ultra-light bottle, Infini, via Pact's licence partner, Nampak, which had developed the bottle. This enabled Pact to provide Australia and New Zealand with a milk bottle that leaves the smallest carbon footprint possible from bottle to bin.
Infini is the lightest bottle in the Australian and New Zealand marketplace, and won the Dairy Innovations Award in 2013. It can be up to 22% lighter than any milk packaging products currently available, but it’s still made from the same HDPE. This allows it to be both durable and completely recyclable. Because of its special engineering and design, the bottle is as “light as a cloud and as strong as a rock.” Pact redesigned the bottle under an exclusive license with Nampak UK to fit both domestic supply chain requirements and consumers’ fridges. The Infini range is available in 2-litre and 3-litre bottles.
Worldwide sales of Infini reached the 500 million mark in May this year. If Australia replaces its existing supply of all milk bottles with the Infini range, we will use 581 tonnes less resin than we do at present. That’s the equivalent weight of about fourteen million regular 2 litre milk bottles.
