Polyester recycling word wide-development and outlook
When we examine the development of the polyester recyclingcross the World, we can find some interesting correlations, impacts andsimilarities.
As frontier of many industrial developments the USA started the first substantial PET-recycling during the late 70th. Low raw material cost-at that time used PET bottles where rubbish -and environmental activities of ahighly developed society have been the major driving forces to develop within arelatively short time an US polyester recycling industry.
The saturation of this development came during the late 90thand the first years of the new century. The achieved collecting level of 20 -25%became stagnant for several reasons. Mainly driven by the sharply rising pricesof baled bottles and the general down trend of the US textile-industry theinterest in PET-recycling shrunk. Driving force behind was the exploding textileindustry in China connected to a tremendous price increase of collected/baledPET bottles.
As point of remembering: During the years 1995 -2000 theprice of one ton baled bottles was between 20 and 50 Euros. Today one must payapproximately ten times of this price!
Today mainly the brand owners in USA like Coca Cola keepingthe PET recycling running on an dissatisfactory level by forcing the bottleproducer to apply a fix amount of 10-30% of recycled polymer in each newbottle.
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