A chip packet back to a chip packet. That would be nirvana for Darren Thorpe and the team at APR Plastics. The Victorian-based company, a sister company to Australian Paper Recovery and APR Kerbside, is pioneering recycling technology in Australia that will give soft plastics a second life.
And Darren is confident they’ll soon be able to provide Australia’s biggest food manufacturers with what they need to produce packaging from fully recycled material.
Following the success of a pilot project that turns soft plastics into oils for plastic remanufacture, through a process known as pyrolysis, APR is scaling up the process.
The company aims to commission a demonstration plant in Bacchus Marsh, in Melbourne’s north-west, early 2025 and a sorting facility in Dandenong by mid 2025.
“This is the first time in Australia that pyrolysis has been used to turn plastic back to plastic,” says Darren, APR Managing Director.
“We’re taking a product made from fossil crude and turning it back into recycled content that can be used repeatedly. These products are used to create a new circular economy – that excites me.”
Australia uses about 70 billion pieces of soft “scrunchable” plastics such as food wrappers each year, according to the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. One million tonnes of that annual plastic consumption are single-use plastics, 84 per cent of which is sent to landfill and only 13 per cent is recycled.
The National Plastics Plan sets a target of 70 per cent of plastic packaging to go on to be recycled or composted by 2025 and to have at least 50 per cent of recycled content within packaging.
The collapse of in-store collection service REDcycle in November 2022 forced the packaging and recycling industries, and government, to look at how to build ongoing sustainable pathways for soft plastic.
Darren says that after glass, soft plastics is the biggest contaminant of kerbside, yellow-topped bins in Victoria. He’s made it his mission to keep soft plastics out of landfill and has been working on a recycling solution since 2019.
Most soft plastics, such as chip packets and chocolate wrappers, are multilayered. The outside is polypropylene, but the inside is barrier film that protects the integrity of the food. Traditional mechanical recycling processes cannot separate the layers, so soft plastics have been considered a contaminant.
APR’s process will separate the polypropylene from the barrier film. The polypropylene will be turned into a vapour and then condensed into an oil which will be sent to a refinery to be further processed so it can be reused in food-grade plastic products.
A prototype pyrolysis machine was installed at APR’s Dandenong South facility in 2022 to test the process and the oil production.
Darren says that pilot program, run with Victoria Environment Protection Authority approval, provided insights into the quality of material required and the best way to move forward.
APR also worked with several companies, including on-demand recycling service RecycleSmart, the Curby Program in New South Wales and South Australia, and local councils with the National Plastics Recycling Scheme (NPRS), to determine the best collection program to make it easy for residents to participate in soft plastics recycling.
The new sorting facility, which will give APR the best quality material with minimal contaminants, is in response to those trials.
Darren says proceeding with caution has been important to ensure the supply chain is established before ramping up production.
“Anything that’s new is always challenging, and you need to go that extra step to ensure there’s no hiccups,” he says. “We all want to make sure this is right because once we get this right, and I’m 100 per cent positive we will, it will be the stepping stone for the sector.”
APR is finalising a development licence application with the Victorian EPA and hopes to turn the first sod on the Bacchus Marsh facility late in 2024. Under the banner of APR ChemCycle, the facility will receive material from the new sorting line and process up to 10 tonnes of polypropylene material a day, seven days a week.
Darren is keen to scale up rapidly to take on the 400,000 tonnes of multi-layered polyethylene material that is currently going to landfill, and supply APR’s offtake partners.
In May 2023, Viva Energy announced plans to build infrastructure to enable its Geelong refinery to process feedstocks such as synthetic crude made from waste plastics.
The plan builds on a pilot program in 2021, during which the refinery processed synthetic crude oil made from waste soft plastics. This was used to produce recycled plastic which was subsequently used to produce food-grade plastic wrappers.
At the time, Viva Energy aimed to process up to 50,000 tonnes per year as feedstock production increased.
“We need to scale it pretty quickly,” Darren says.
“Australia has 400,000 tonnes of multi-layered polyethylene material, that’s a big number. We’re talking up to 33,000 tonnes in our plant alone.”
He’s quick to point out that the plastics-to-oil process is not an alternative to mechanical recycling of clear soft plastics, such as industrial plastic wrap, but is complementary.
Darren says all sections of the industry are watching APR’s progress. The potential of pyrolysis has also attracted the attention of Australian Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek and Lily D’Ambrosio, former Victorian Environment Minister, who have both visited the Dandenong South plant.
“Everyone’s keen to get this going,” Darren says.
“I believe right now we’re a train driver ready to leave the station. Once we start producing oil everyone will want to get on that carriage, because something is happening and it’s proving successful.
“This is something I’m passionate about, that’s why I continue to fight. This will be the soft plastics success that we’re looking for.”
For more information, visit: www.aprplastics.com.au
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