Indorama Ventures Public Co. Ltd. (IVL), headquartered in Thailand, announced the opening of its polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle recycling plant in the Philippines, PETValue Philippines, in partnership with Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines Inc., the bottling of Coca-Cola in the country. The company says PETValue is the nation’s first food-grade recycling facility.
PETValue Philippines is located in General Trias in the province of Cavite, south of Manila. IVL says it built the plant in partnership with Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines as part of Coca-Cola Co. world without waste program to collect and recycle the equivalent of every bottle sold by 2030. With the new plant, IVL says it will recycle around 2 billion additional used PET bottles in the Philippines every year and create around 200 new local jobs . The plant will wash and shred post-consumer bottles into flakes to produce recycled PET resin that can be used in food contact applications.
Managed under IVL Regional Commercial Management for Recycling Vertical Anivesh Tewari, PETValue brings together a team led by Site Manager Joel Potian, who has nearly three decades of manufacturing and chemical engineering expertise in the Philippines and Korea. He is supported by Aris Castillo as CFO, formerly of Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines, with over 10 years of supply chain finance and manufacturing experience.
Sanjay Ahuja, Executive Chairman of Combined PET, Indorama Ventures, said, “PETValue is an important development for IVL, for our partner Coca-Cola and for the Filipino community. IVL, as the largest producer of recycled PET resin, brings its global experience and know-how to increase its capacity and recycle more bottles. This, combined with the powerful consumer footprint of our partner Coca-Cola, represents significant potential for us, as resolute companies, to close the loop of plastic bottle recycling and help solve waste in the Philippines.
IVL says it has passed the milestone halfway towards meeting its 2025 goal of increasing its recycling capacity to 750,000 tonnes per year. The company is investing $1.5 billion globally to expand its recycling facilities and sustainable production, including a new goal of reaching 1.5 million tonnes of PET bales per year by 2030.
The company says PETValue will encourage a more robust value chain to help solve the growing problem of post-consumer waste management in the Philippines.
Yash Lohia, Chairman of the ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) Council of Indorama Ventures, adds: “By the end of this year, we will have increased our recycling capacity to over 375,000 tonnes. In 2021, we acquired a PET recycling plant in Texas and announced our intention to build a new plant in Indonesia. In 2020, we signed a joint venture agreement with Coca-Cola to build a state-of-the-art recycling plant in the Philippines, which resulted in today’s announcement. In the same year, we also acquired recycling plants in Brazil and two in Poland. This should be celebrated given the difficult context of the pandemic. These seven plants will join a family of existing recycling sites in Alabama, Ireland, two in France and the Netherlands.
Gareth McGeown, President and CEO of Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines, adds, “Sustainability is at the heart of who we are as a company, as evidenced by more than a century of Coca-Cola considering the Philippines like his homeland. We are immensely proud of PETValue Philippines and our partnership with Indorama Ventures, whose global expertise in recycling technologies will prove to be an asset to the Philippines’ collective goals for more sustainable practices and a true circular economy for packaging. recyclable plastic. It’s through innovations like PETValue Philippines and the strong partnerships we’ve formed with like-minded entities like Indorama Ventures that Coca-Cola can continue to serve Filipino communities for another hundred years.