TECHNOLOGY | MACHINERY
Above: Starlinger RecoStar bottle-to-bottle PET recycling system
the PCR PET bottles mostly from municipal kerb- side collection across Pakistan, and the rPET chips it produces are used in the company’s own PET preform production or sold on the local and international market. “By producing bottle-grade recycled PET we want to support our partners PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and others, to meet their circularity targets,” said Rizwan Diwan, CEO at Novatex. “The produced rPET has all the necessary food-contact certifications and is being used by all major brands. In addition, the government of Pakistan is pushing hard to eliminate single-use plastics and plastic waste.” Pakistan does not yet have a national mandatory
Right: Coperion’s EcoFresh silo devolatilisation solutions ensure residual odours are removed from the compounds
recycled content quota for plastic packaging comparable to the EU’s PPWR, despite studies estimating that Pakistan generates around 3.12m tonnes of plastic waste annually, of which only 4% to 9% is currently recycled. The country’s efforts to tackle plastic waste, however, are evolving. In the last year, it has moved from plastic bans and pilot initiatives in individual provinces toward a more coordinated national approach, but implementa- tion remains uneven. In April 2025, the government of Pakistan, together with the United Nations Development Programme and the World Economic Forum, launched the National Plastic Action Partnership Roadmap, which has been described as the most important framework for plastics waste management on a national level.
Paths to market Coperion has received a Letter of No Objection (LNO) from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its HDPE and PP recycling technology, confirming that the combination of Coperion twin screw extruders and EcoFresh silo degassing used in the manufacture of rHDPE and rPP fulfils the requirements for direct contact with food. Coperi-
14 PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD | October 2026
www.plasticsrecyclingworld.com
on says it is the first provider of complete decon- tamination systems featuring twin screw extruders and EcoFresh silo degassing to offer the market a highly efficient solution for the production of food-grade recyclates, covering capacities from small throughputs up to 6,000 kg/h. The company says this opens up a range of new possibilities in the recycling of food packaging. For example, food-grade regranulate can be produced from HDPE milk jugs or fruit juice bottles, and then reused to manufacture similar bottles or related products. Raw material for the food-safe rHDPE recyclate process generally consists of used HDPE beverage bottles or their caps, while the material stream for rPP compounds consists of vegetable trays, packaging, yogurt containers, and the like. The material is fed into the extruder via Coperion K-Tron gravimetric feeders, where it is first melted, intensively mixed, homogenised and degassed. Coperion says it benefits from many years of
experience in melt and solid devolatilisation when designing process parameters, and has designed both the process and the screw configuration to optimally meet the requirements of the respective recycling application. The material is purified of solid foreign materials via a melt filter and then pelletised before undergoing a second decontami- nation step in the EcoFresh silo degassing unit. “The basis for the suitability of our HDPE and PP recycling solutions for manufacturing food-contact materials lies in our integrated approach as a system provider,” said Stefan Lachenmayer, Global Commercial Director Recycling at Coperion. “We look at the entire process and apply our decon-
IMAGE: STARLINGER
IMAGE: COPERION
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