Swire Coca-Cola celebrates grand opening of New Life Plastics

The largest food-grade ready plastic recycling facility in Hong Kong

Swire Coca-Cola Limited, in a joint venture with ALBA Group (Asia) Limited (ALBA) and Baguio Waste Management and Recycling Limited (Baguio), establishes New Life Plastics Limited (NLP), the largest food-grade ready plastic recycling facility in Hong Kong.

The 6,500-square-metre recycling facility, located in Lot T6 of the EcoPark in Tuen Mun, currently processes 400 tonnes of recycled beverage bottles per month.  With capacity to handle up to 900 tonnes of PET per month, NLP provides: proper disposal of plastic bottles, a substantial solution to landfill waste, savings on waste charges, and progress toward carbon neutrality.

Frank Schepers, General Manager of New Life Plastics points out, "NLP's goal is to become a sustainable development player between consumers, producers and the government.  As an industrial scaled player, we aim to close the loop at the end-consumption and to produce food-grade ready rPET flakes and high-quality rHDPE flakes for a broad range of applications."

Patrick Healy, Chairman of Swire Coca-Cola, says, "In 2017, Swire Coca-Cola, alongside other beverage manufacturers, retailers, NGOs, recyclers and other interested parties, came together as founding members of the Single-Use Beverage Packaging Working Group. That group launched the 'Drink Without Waste' initiative, one of whose key aims was to create a true circular economy for beverage packaging in Hong Kong."

As one of the advocates of 'Drink Without Waste', Swire Coca-Cola has made a series of commitments, including dramatically reducing the amount of plastic in PET bottles and increasing the recycled content in primary packaging. The establishment of NLP represents a huge step towards the goal of 'closing the loop', that is, collecting and processing Hong Kong's discarded PET bottles to produce the raw materials which come back into the supply chain as recycled PET, Healy describes.    

In Hong Kong, approximately 86 tonnes of PET-made waste plastic, equivalent to more than 4.7 million plastic beverage containers, are disposed at landfills daily in 2020. The government has been expanding the pilot scheme on waste plastics collection and recycling since March 2022 to cover half of Hong Kong’s population.  To effectively recycle plastics into useful resources, plastic beverage containers should be properly separated at source for collection and professionally treated after their service life.       

Schepers explains, "The major customers of NLP are local beverage manufacturers such as Swire Coca-Cola, one of the primary shareholders of the company.  We are also in discussions with other beverage producers to process and recycle their PET bottles through NLP.  Our aim is that in the near future other well-known brands will join us and work together to contribute to the sustainable development of the beverage market in Hong Kong."

NLP is driving the so-called 'bottle-to-bottle' approach. The rPET plastic boom is attracting wider attention and NLP is taking the lead in the domestic market for food-grade ready rPET recycling process. NLP adds value to the conventional plastic bottle recycling industry by providing a sustainable solution to Hong Kong's plastic bottle usage through the creation of a circular economy for PET beverage bottles, Schepers concludes.