Indorama Ventures (IVL), the world’s largest producer of recycled PET for beverage bottles, has acquired an 85% equity stake in Czech Republic-based PET plastic recycler, UCY Polymers, boosting the country and Europe’s plastic collection and recycling ambitions.

As a result of the investment, IVL will recycle about 1.12 billion additional post-consumer PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles in the Czech Republic every year by 2025, increasing the total bottles recycled by UCY across the Czech Republic, Germany and Central Europe to 1.6 billion bottles annually.

IVL is investing US$1.5 billion globally to expand recycling facilities and sustainable production, including boosting its recycling capacity to 750,000 tons per year by 2025.

UCY is a strategic fit for IVL as a backward integration into the company’s expanding recycled PET (rPET) footprint in Europe and across the world to secure feedstock for rPET products. UCY can produce 40,000 tons of recycled PET flake per year. IVL will develop UCY to serve the increasing demand.

UCY will work with IVL’s existing PET flake production facilities in the region. These provide the washed and shredded post-consumer bottles as PET flake feedstock to produce rPET resin that is suitable for food contact use. PET is fully recyclable and the most collected and recycled plastic packaging in Europe.

“As part of our commitment to sustainability and the circular economy, we are building the recycling infrastructure needed to divert PET waste from the environment,” said DK Agarwal, IVL’s CEO and CFO. “By recycling post-consumer PET bottles into new bottles, we give waste an economic value. This drives improvements in waste collection systems, meaning less waste and a cleaner environment.”

“We look forward to adding our robust supply of post-consumer bottles, well-established technology and proven management team to IVL,” added Maximilian Josef Söllner, UCY CEO. “Expanding our capacity by 2025 means an extra 896 million more bottles will be recycled in our facilities compared to today.”

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