Indorama Ventures, Coca-Cola open PET recycling plant

Indorama Ventures Public Co. Ltd. (IVL), headquartered in Thailand, has announced the opening of its polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in the Philippines, PETValue Philippines, in partnership with Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines Inc., the bottling arm of Coca-Cola in the country. The company says PETValue is the country’s first food-grade, bottle-to-bottle recycling facility.

PETValue Philippines is in General Trias in the Cavite province, south of Manila. IVL says it built the plant in partnership with Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines as part of the Coca-Cola Co.’s World Without Waste program to collect and recycle the equivalent of every bottle it sells by 2030. With the new plant, IVL says it will recycle about 2 billion additional used PET bottles in the Philippines every year and create about 200 new local jobs. The plant will wash and shred postconsumer bottles into flakes to produce recycled PET resin that is suitable for use in food-contact applications.

Managed under IVL’s regional business lead 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 chief financial officer, formerly from Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines, with more than 10 years in supply chain finance and manufacturing.

Sanjay Ahuja, executive president of Combined PET, Indorama Ventures, says, “PETValue is an important development for IVL, for our partner Coca-Cola and for the Philippines community. IVL, as the largest producer of recycled PET resin, is bringing our global experience and know-how to grow capacity and recycle more bottles. This, together with our partner Coca-Cola’s powerful consumer footprint, represents significant potential for us, as purposeful companies, to close the loop on plastic bottle recycling and help resolve waste in the Philippines.”

IVL says it has surpassed the midway milestone toward meeting its 2025 target of increasing its recycling capacity to 750,000 tons per year. The company is investing $1.5 billion globally to expand its recycling facilities and sustainable production, including the new goal to reach consume 1.5 million tons of PET bales per year by 2030.

The company says PETValue will encourage a more robust value chain to help address the growing postconsumer waste management problem in the Philippines.

Yash Lohia, chairman of the ESG (environmental, social and governance) Council at Indorama Ventures, adds, “By the end of this year, we will have increased our recycling capacity to more than 375,000 tons. In 2021, we acquired a PET recycling plant in Texas and announced plans to build a new facility 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 culminated in today’s announcement. In the same year, we also acquired recycling plants in Brazil and two in Poland. This is to be celebrated given the challenging pandemic environment. 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 treating the Philippines as its home. We are extremely 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 truly circular economy for recyclable plastic packaging. It is through innovations like PETValue Philippines and the strong partnerships we’ve formed with like-minded entities like Indorama Ventures that Coca-Cola can continue serving Filipino communities for another hundred years.”