Page 18 - Packaging News Magazine Jan-Feb 21

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COVER STORY | www.packagingnews.com.au | January-February 2021
A winning, circular outlook
LyondellBasell is the 2020 winner of the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation’s top award for Sustainable Packaging Excellence, recognised for a slew of impressive achievements, including its move to deliver 70 per cent of products in reusable bulk packaging formats and diverting 80 per cent of on-site waste from landfill. PKN takes a closer look at the company’s sustainability achievements and projects.
sources, and developing its low car- bon product portfolio.
And all this is just the ground- work for the big one – LyondellBasell will join American Chemistry Council (ACC) and Plastics Europe industry peers to help ensure that no less than the full 100 per cent of plastics packaging is reused, recy- cled, or recovered, by 2040.
The company is also a founding member of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW), which was created in January 2019 to help solve the issue of the eight million tonnes of plastic waste entering the ocean every year. LyondellBasell CEO Bob Patel is the vice chair of the AEPW board.
LASTIC packaging is under the pump, with consumers fretting over mountains of packaging waste on land and waves of the material in the world’s oceans, all of it impacting the lives of animals, fish and humans.
However, the world’s plastic pack- aging producers are rising to face
solutions for cities through its col- laboration with the Alliance to End Plastic Waste.
The company’s 2030 plastics tar- get is the latest in a suite of efforts it is currently engaged with, all aimed at combatting plastic waste.
Among its 2030 targets the company is aiming to reduce its
the issue, including LyondellBasell, which has set itself what it says is one of the most ambitious sustain- ability goals in the plastics industry.
The company now has a target of producing and marketing two mil- lion tonnes of recycled and renew- able-based polymer by the end of the decade. In addition to that tar- get, LyondellBasell will also be increasing its investment in plas- tics recovery and recycling, and will be highlighting its success- ful plastic waste management
CO2emissions by 15 per cent of prod- uct produced, relative to 2015 levels. Back then its direct emissions from its operated sites, and indirect emis- sions from external electricity and steam suppliers, amounted to 22.8m tonnes a year, emitting 0.57 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of product.
LyondellBasell’s reduced emis- sions will come through increas- ing its use of renewable energy, optimising efficiencies from fossil fuel energy, increasing its usage of feedstock derived from renewable
MEETING ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES
The extensive portfolio of projects the company is currently involved with is evidence of the existing com- mitment to meeting the environmen- tal challenges.
In September last year, Lyondell- Basell pushed the button on its pilot plant that has been built to return post-con- sumer plastic waste to its molecular form for use as feedstock. This is known as