AUSTRALIA – Australian packaging and recycling company Visy has announced the acquisition of assets from the collapsed plastics recycling firm, Advanced Circular Polymers (ACP).
This strategic move aims to strengthen Visy’s recycling operations and prevent a significant volume of challenging-to-recycle plastics from being sent to landfills.
ACP, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, specialized in reprocessing plastics obtained from kerbside recycling, selling the processed material for reuse. The facility had an annual processing capacity exceeding 30,000 tonnes.
Mark De Wit, Visy CEO, emphasized the company’s commitment to waste diversion, stating, “We’re not just a manufacturing company – diverting material away from landfill is at the heart of what we do. We’ll be on site from this week to begin the clean-up process. We are committed to processing the over 1,000 tonnes of unprocessed material on the site.”
Visy plans to send some of the acquired material to its food-grade recycled plastics manufacturing site in Smithfield, New South Wales.
There, the material will be converted into food-grade rPET and rHDPE containers. Additionally, Visy has signed a five-year lease with the property’s landlord, demonstrating its commitment to processing challenging-to-recycle plastics in Australia.
In October of the previous year, Visy inaugurated a new corrugated cardboard box facility in Queensland, Australia, with a capacity to manufacture up to one million boxes per day.
This A$175 million (US$114.76 million) factory produces cardboard boxes for food and beverage companies, as well as farmers and growers in Queensland.
The investment is part of Visy executive chair Anthony Pratt’s commitment to invest A$2 billion (US$1.31 billion) over the next decade in packaging infrastructure in Australia, with A$700 million (US$459.06 million) allocated for use in Queensland.
Pratt highlighted the favorable business environment created by the Queensland Government for manufacturers, stating, “We’ve invested A$175 million (US$114.76 million) to build the most productive and technically advanced corrugated box-making facility in the country.
“We’ve installed the latest 2.8m-wide corrugator – the most modern corrugator in the Southern Hemisphere.”
Visy actively collects mixed paper and cardboard from businesses and households in the state, recycling them at its Gibson Island facility to produce 100% recycled paper, avoiding landfill or exportation of the materials.
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