Following 18 months of construction and installation, the ALPLA Group and PTT Global Chemical are opening the state-of-the-art ENVICCO recycling plant in Thailand. With an annual production capacity of 45,000 tonnes of recycled PET and HDPE, it is one of the largest recycling plants for these plastics in Asia. With this plant, the two companies will strengthen the region’s circular economy and supply the growing markets with high-quality recycled material.

Thirty thousand tonnes of recycled, food-grade PET and 15,000 tonnes of recycled HDPE – the packaging and recycling specialist ALPLA and the chemical company PTT Global Chemical (GC) have realised Thailand’s largest plastics recycling plant of its kind. After around 18 months of construction, production is set to start at the ENVICCO joint venture. Located in an economic zone on the coast of the south-eastern province of Rayong, the plant is equipped with the latest recycling technology and production lines to manufacture high-quality plastic recyclates with approval from the USFDA.

‘Built in record time thanks to the excellent collaboration with GC, this highly modern plant is an important part of our recycling activities in Asia,’ said ALPLA Chairman Günther Lehner during the grand opening on 13 September. The opening was also attended, among others, by Kongkrapan Intarajang (Chief Executive Officer and President, GC), Dietmar Marin (ALPLA Managing Director Recycling) and Bernd Wachter (ALPLA Corporate Director Circular Economy & Recycling Asia).

‘Demand for recycled, sustainable packaging materials is rising sharply in Southeast Asia, and high-quality plastics have a key role to play here. With this new plant, we are now applying our many years of expertise in the treatment and processing of packaging made from post-consumer recycled resins in Thailand,’ explains Bernd Wachter. ‘This joint venture is a truly circular, eco-friendly project creating a comprehensive value chain for plastics in Thailand and is an excellent example of the worldwide use of Austrian green tech know-how,’ adds Georg Weingartner, the Austrian Commercial Counsellor in Bangkok.

ALPLA contributes more than 25 years of recycling experience to the joint venture. It will supply its production facilities in Asia with recycled material and is also fostering the circular economy at the local level. With the plant, majority shareholder GC supports sustainable development in the region, moving it towards resource-conserving business and lifestyles.

‘Today, GC is proud to reveal that ENVICCO is ready for commercial operation. Used plastics within the Kingdom of Thailand will make up 100% of the raw materials processed by ENVICCO’s cutting-edge production technologies to transform used plastics into valuable products,’ says Kongkrapan Intarajang. ‘The ENVICCO production plant is part of our long-term circular economy strategy to fully realize GC’s value chain. It also has the added benefit of creating jobs within the community while simultaneously aligning with the Thai government’s Bio-Circular-Green Economy Model.’ The ENVICCO team will comprise approximately 180 employees at the start of production.

The 30,000-square-metre plant is on a plot of land measuring a good 90,000 square metres at the Map Ta Phut Industrial Estate. There is, therefore, also space for future capacity expansions. ‘We have long-term plans to promote the bottle-to-bottle cycle not only here in Thailand, but across Asia and other regions around the world. Carbon emissions and waste can be reduced through optimised resource consumption,’ emphasises Dietmar Marin.

In early 2021, the ALPLA Group announced that it would invest an average of 50 million euros a year until 2025 in the ongoing expansion of its recycling activities. In particular, it plans to globalise its activities in the area of high-quality recyclates to close the materials cycle in as many regions as possible. In total, the annual production capacity of ALPLA’s recycling companies and cooperations around the world amounts to approximately 203,000 tonnes of rPET (recycled PET) and 74,000 tonnes of rHDPE (recycled HDPE).