(6 July 2021 – Australia) The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) has closed its first plastics recycling investment deal, allocating A$16.5 million to a plastics recycling plant.
The debt finance is the first project by Australia’s green bank under its A$100 million Australian Recycling Investment Fund. The deal supports a A$45 million recycling venture including Cleanaway, Pact Group and Asahi Beverages.
The project will draw on A$16.5 million of debt capital from CBA to close the loop between new and recycled packaging, critical to increasing the circularity of the economy. The CEFC’s recycling fund, drawing upon existing CEFC finance, focuses specifically on major projects that use clean energy technologies to support the recycling of waste plastics, paper, glass and tyres.
The Circular Plastics Australia venture is set to become Australia’s largest recycling plant for polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics, scaling up capacity to recycle 1 billion soft drink bottles per annum at a plant in Albury-Wodonga. The plant significantly increases Australia’s ability to recycle PET and is timely given the export ban on sending mixed plastics overseas for recycling, previously China, has come into effect. The ban, which commenced in the new 2021/22 financial year, has triggered warnings of increased volumes of plastics being disposed of in landfill or stored in warehouses given a lack of domestic processing capacity.
Only 13 percent of plastic used in Australia is currently recycled. 84 percent of plastics in Australia end up in landfill and 1 million tonnes a year of plastic is single-use yet only one tenth is recycled according to the federal government’s National Plastics Plan.
“The investment supports Australia’s recycling industry at a time of significant change in the sector and represents a major advance of the development of a circular economy. This is a genuine closed-loop recycling solution that reduces the amount of plastic that goes to landfill” commented CEFC CEO Ian Learmonth.
“We are particularly proud that the Australian Recycling Investment Fund’s first investment builds Australia’s capacity to generate high-value recycled commodities that create an important revenue stream while also reducing carbon emissions” Learmonth added.