PET – The pathway of your (recyclable) plastic bottle

Most of our plastic bottles for beverages are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET). In Switzerland, about 83% of

PET-bottles are recycled, which is the case when you throw your used bottle into a specific waste bin (yellow/blue).

Outside of the conference centre, all PET plastics, which are mostly bottles, can be returned to collection points on the

street or to all points of sale of PET beverage bottles.

Approximately 35% of a PET beverage bottle bought in the Swiss market is from recycled material. Thus, the recycling of PET is not only environmentally friendly, it is also less expen-

sive for producers - at least as long the oil price stays above 70 US-Dollars per Barrel.

What actually happens to your used plastic bottle, which you just

threw into the recycling bin?

The collection of PET-Bottles As we have seen before, most of the wastes are normally organised by one of the state levels, for example, by the municipality or the canton. However, PET-recycling in Switzerland is one of the only waste streams which is covered by federal law. To avoid a deposit for PET bottles, producers, retailers and shops gathered together in an association to organise their own recycling system, which led to today’s voluntary system. Therefore, collection, transportation and recycling of PET-bottles is organised by private companies and subcontractors, coordinated by the aforementioned private association.

In a first step, the full plastic bags from the PET-recycling bins within the CICG are collected by a private company entrusted to organise the collection of the PET-Bottles in the district of the conference centre. The vehicles will transport the bottles to their headquarters in Carouge, Geneva, where the bottles are processed into bales of 200 to 300 kg weight. The bales are then loaded on train wagons heading to one of the five sorting centres in Switzerland.

For the Geneva area, the sorting centre

is in Grandson, near to Yverdon-les-

Bains, about 90 km from Geneva, where

the PET bottles are sorted into different

colours. Contaminants within the PET-

bottles are then detected. This happens

automatically by machines, which

separate the bottles and possible

contaminants in fractions of a second,

processing up to 150,000 bottles per

hour. The system achieves a degree of

purity of 95 to 99.8 percent of PET

sorted by colour.

After sorting, the pure PET bales, which will contain the bottle you just threw into

the recycling bin, are sent to one of two recycling centres in Switzerland. For bottles

in Geneva, this happens in the village of Bilten in eastern Switzerland about 300 km

from Geneva. The bottles are shredded in a “plastic mill” and sliced into 12 mm size

plastic flakes. After several “washing” steps the flakes are of such high quality that

they can be reused to package food or beverages.

Finally, the flakes are then bought by factories which produce new bottles. Thus, the

closed PET cycle makes it possible for empty PET beverage bottles to be turned into

new ones.