APK Intends to Build Plastic Recycling Plants in Asia and Europe

German-based company APK Aluminium und Kunststoffe AG plans to set up recycling plants by 2025 together with strategic partners in Europe and South-East Asia in order to strengthen plastics recycling.

According to a study by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation earlier this year, world-wide plastics production has reached more than 300 million tons per year and is still increasing. Roughly 78 million tons per year are consumed in single-use packaging, much of which ends up in incineration, landfills or in the oceans. Less than 17 percent of all plastic waste is currently recycled worldwide – this low number is due to a lack of efficient collection and sorting systems as well as a lack of advanced recycling technology in some regions. APK is convinced that the company has developed a breakthrough technology which can be applied to a broad variety of plastic types and combinations commonly used in packaging, even difficult ones including multi-layer films. The technology exploits physical and chemical properties of different polymer types in order to separate these efficiently, resulting in high-purity single-polymer streams, the firm emphasized.

“In Germany we have developed an advanced and economically interesting recycling technology to recover virgin-quality polymers from plastic-packaging waste. We call it Newcycling,” CEO Klaus Wohnig explained. “We now want to expand in Europe while simultaneously bringing our technology to the region where the problem is acute: South-East Asia. Of course, we are open to further co-operations with interested industry partners in order to change the plastics economy from linear to truly circular as soon as possible.” APK Aluminium und Kunststoffe AG was founded in 2008 and has expertise and patented technology in both mechanical and physical-chemical recycling of a variety of feedstocks. The company is owned by Munich based financial investors MIG Fonds and AT Newtec, an investment company of family office Struengmann.

www.apk-ag.de

Photo: APK Aluminium und Kunststoffe AG

GR 22107