In an Australian first, Visy has confirmed its ability to produce a 50 per cent recycled plastic (rHDPE) milk bottle, an achievement which was featured on 9News this week.
Visy says its $29 million multi-state plastics recycling investment is diverting up to 1.9 billion plastic bottles from landfill and export each year, and keeping more plastics in the circular economy to be re-made locally into food grade products.
The 9News report pointed out that 98,000 tonnes comes through the doors of Visy facility each year, mainly from kerbside collections, and that prreviously the milk bottles made from recycled plastic there, had only 20 per cent of recycled materials used in them.
In the report Rob Dvorak, RPlastics manager, Visy, said, "With this investment we're now able to close the loop, improve the circular economy and make sure that milk bottles can go back into milk bottles."
"A lot of milk bottles and plastic waste was heading straight to landfill Just about every single piece of plastic that has ever been created is still with us today in some way, shape or form,” said Environment Minister, James Griffin in the 9News report.
The 9News report confirmed that the new process took a lot of testing, and has been given the approval for food grade recycling, and that the goal is now for other recycling organisations to follow suit.
"We were one of the leaders in terms of producing PET plastic bottles with 100 per cent recycled content when this facility first started 10 years ago. And we are now leading the way in terms of recycling some of the hard to recycle plastics," concluded Dvorak in the 9News report.
