Pact Group Announces New Recycled Packaging Partnership With ALDI

Pact Group, a leading plastic recycler and sustainable packaging manufacturer, has signed a strategic partnership with ALDI Australia to supply recycled plastic packaging for some of the retail giant’s own brand products.

Under the new partnership, Pact will offer ALDI’s supply partners access to more sustainable packaging options for ALDI’s exclusive brand products, such as milk bottles, meat trays, fruit and vegetable punnets, beverage bottles and shampoo bottles.

Pact will manufacture the packaging at its facilities in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland using recycled PET and HDPE plastic resins.

Pact CEO Sanjay Dayal said: “We are delighted to be working with ALDI to drive positive change and reduce the amount of plastic waste going to landfill. Recycled plastic packaging that is designed and manufactured effectively, recycled properly, and disposed of correctly is the key to building a successful circular economy in Australia.”

ALDI Australia’s Managing Director Buying, Oliver Bongardt said: “As one of Australia’s largest grocery retailers, we understand the important role we play in reducing our use of plastic and improving the circularity of our product packaging. We are pleased to be partnering with Pact to introduce more sustainable packaging options, which will accelerate progress towards our plastics and packaging commitments.”

The Pact–ALDI partnership represents an important step forward for both companies to achieve their sustainability goals.

Pact has a vision to lead the circular economy and has set a target of eliminating all non-recyclable packaging it produces and offer an average of 30% recycled content across its packaging portfolio by 2025. ALDI has committed to reducing plastic packaging by 25% and include 30% recycled content in its plastic packaging by 2025.

Pact is currently investing more than $76M in new packaging manufacturing equipment across its Australian operations in order to manufacture high quality recycled packaging products with an increased amount of recycled plastic resin.

Pact is also expanding its plastic recycling capabilities with its joint venture partners. The Pact-operated Circular Plastics Australia (PET) recycling plant in Albury, NSW is the biggest of its kind in Australia and has the capacity to recycle up to 1 billion 600ml PET beverage bottles a year – or around 20,000 tonnes of PET plastic.

A second PET recycling plant in Melbourne with similar processing capacity is scheduled to open in late 2023. Both facilities are joint ventures between Pact, Cleanaway Waste Management, Asahi Beverages and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. The recycled PET resin from these facilities is used to make new beverage bottles and food packaging.

Construction is almost complete on a mixed plastics recycling facility in Melbourne in partnership with Cleanaway which will process about 20,000 tonnes of mixed plastic waste – or the equivalent of half a billion HDPE plastic milk bottles and dairy containers a year.