Page 35 - Packaging News magazine Jul-Aug 2021

July-August 2021 | www.packagingnews.com.au FACTORY FOCUS
35
Martogg advances circularity
The Martogg Group’s Life Cycle Management (LCM) division is driving the change to a circular economy for plastics. Jan Arreza reports.
approved and is manufactured via three Vacurema lines in the Martogg’s Dandenong facility, which produces 23,000 tonnes per year.
“The machines treat the material through the reactors then decontami- nate it, purifying the resin. This is because a lot of these recycled mate- rials are going back into food contact applications,” adds Greg Kerslake, manufacturing manager, Martogg.
“Very fine particulates are removed through this process to ensure that the quality of the material doesn’t have any contaminants introduced into the actual finished product.
“Once everything is sampled and quality control passed, we put it into stores and away it goes. And it can go around infinitely, becoming a com- pletely circular process.”
The materials are delivered to sev- eral of Martogg’s partners, including RPAK, which manufactures and dis- tributes a wide range of recycled food packaging to industry.
“marPET gives us the opportunity to increase the amount of recycled content that we can use. Without mar- PET, I’ll only achieve 30 per cent max- imum. marPET enabled us to take that to 50-100 per cent,” explains Michael Reid, managing director, RPAK.
McCulloch believes it is partnerships like this that will push forward Australia’s circular economy transition.
“But I believe it begins and ends with consumers actively seeking prod- uct packaging that contains recycled content,” he says. “If consumers are actively seeking product packaging that contains recycled content, they are buying it and know the story behind it, then we’ve got a circular economy on our hands.” ■
OPERATING as Martogg’s sustain- ability arm, the LCM division provides organisations through- out Australia and the world with an extensive range of recycled polymers, both for industrial and food contact applications.
“We’ve always had a circular men- tality to plastics since our inception, using recycled feedstocks in all areas of our business – from selected master batch and engineering resins, to commodity compounding and outright recycling. From our experi- ence, plastic is far too valuable a resource to only use it once,” says Austen Ramage, group sustainabil- ity manager for Martogg Group.
According to Ben McCulloch, product manager of the group’s own brand of rPET, known as marPET, society has long been benefitting from plastic in some way, shape or form due to its many different uses, which is why it has dominated the packaging industry for decades.
“We’ve got a stockpile of waste that is growing at a pretty rapid rate and we need to find a solution that isn’t just putting it into the ground,
shipping it offshore, or letting it enter our environment,” McCulloch says.
“We have to take our own respon- sibility for it, and the good news is that plastic is inherently recyclable, so the whole notion around plastic being a single-use material is false.
“We have been recycling for years – you can look at PET as an example of this material. As a post-consumer material it can be recycled back into food grade resin suitable for the same application that it originated from.”
marPET is 100 per cent recycled raw material that can effectively be reused over and over again. It is food contact
ABOVE: Martogg says marPET will help advance the circular economy in Australia.
RIGHT: Martogg’s three Vacurema lines produce 23,000 tonnes of marPET per annum.