Brother’s drinks wins industry award for PET liner recycling programme
The manufacturer of Brother’s Cider has been recognised with an industry award for its involvement in a PET liner recycling programme, set up by Avery Dennison and PET UK.
Brothers Drinks Co. Ltd. won FINAT’s 2016 ‘End-User Recycling Award’ in recognition of it being one of the first brands to join a recycling programme for self-adhesive labels waste.
The complex recycling of silicone-coated PET liner was achieved in Europe for the first time when Avery Dennison established its programme with Polymer Extrusion Technologies (UK) Ltd. of Dumfries, Scotland. The programme connects British and Irish brand owners with the release liner recycling facility.
PET in practice
Brothers Drinks started shipping PET liner to PET UK on a regular basis in July 2014 and, in the next 12 months, shipped about 50 tonnes of PET liner from its plant in Somerset in South West England to the recycler in Scotland.
This saved from incineration the waste liner from more than 1.5 million square metres of labels, and yielded enough PET resin to make almost two million microwave trays.
In addition to reducing the material going to incineration or landfill, it offers additional benefits. “We estimate we’ve saved between £6,000 and £8,000 by taking part in this programme,” said Peter Faxholm, Operations Manager at Brothers Drinks.
A global effort
Xander van der Vlies, Sustainability Director for Avery Dennison, said the PET UK recycling scheme is one part of a much wider global effort to meet Avery Dennison’s ambitious 2025 Sustainability Goals, which includes a target of eliminating 70 percent of matrix and liner waste from the industry value chain.
“We are collaborating with customers across every market,” he said. “We are, for example, a partner of the European paper liner recycling programme with Cycle4green for silicone-coated papers and a waste conversion programme with Tramonto Antonio in Italy. Our work with PET UK makes an important contribution to our ongoing efforts of meeting our 2025 Sustainability Goals and minimising environmental impacts.”
To read more about the PET liner recycling programme, please click here.