The battle for PET has erupted

It only takes two seconds, that's all it takes for Gerolsteiner to produce a new mineral water bottle made of single-use plastic. A so-called pre-form – a test tube-shaped blank with a screw thread at the open end – is heated to 120 degrees and then pressed into a mold by a blow-moulding machine with a pressure of 30 bar. A laser then burns a best-before date into the material, and the bottles continue on a conveyor belt to the filling and then to the labeling plant.

Industry giant Gerolsteiner alone has several such production lines for non-returnable bottles, of which even one can handle up to 29,000 containers per hour, depending on the system. Hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles roll off the production line at the company – every day.

When it comes to the mix of materials, Gerolsteiner relies primarily on recycled goods, so-called PET. According to the medium-sized company, 75 percent of the bottles are now made of recycled polyethylene terephthalate. The starting material with the unpronounceable name is obtained primarily from the deposit machines in retail.

But this cycle is becoming increasingly fragile. "It's getting harder and harder to get enough material," reports Roel Annega, CEO of Gerolsteiner, WELT. “We would like to use 100 percent rPET, which is also not a problem technologically. However, we are currently not getting enough recyclates for this.” And under the current circumstances, this shortage will persist in the long term and will probably continue to worsen.

And that's not just because other beverage manufacturers are also increasing the proportion of recycled material in their non-returnable bottles. Rather, competition is increasingly coming from other sectors, such as the textile industry, from car companies and their suppliers, or from consumer goods manufacturers and tire manufacturers. They all crave the high-quality old plastic that has been collected in a particularly pure manner, in order to make their own products more sustainable and to declare them environmentally friendly.

But that upsets Annega badly. "They should create their own cycles," demands the Brunnen boss and describes the emerging dilemma: "Bags, fleece sweaters and car parts can be easily made from an old plastic bottle - but it doesn't work the other way around. And with that, functioning cycles are broken.”

Annega now sees politics as a duty. "Legislators must ensure that beverage manufacturers have first access and are able to buy back their own material," the entrepreneur demands. This is the only way to create the much-cited and demanded circular economy.

The Gerolsteiner boss gets support from Coca-Cola. The large corporation also has problems with the availability of food-grade recyclates and sees its own sustainability goals at risk as a result. The rPET quota for all one-way containers of the beverage giant in Germany is currently 52.5 percent.

In the medium term, however, it should already be 70 percent for brands such as Cola, Fanta and Sprite or Vio, Fuze Tea and Powerade. "We want to take the next step, but are being held back at the moment," says Tilmann Rothhammer, Managing Director Customer Service and Supply Chain at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, the bottling and distribution company of Coca-Cola in Germany.

He also calls for a bottle-to-bottle approach and thus priority access for beverage manufacturers to collected non-returnable PET bottles. "Currently only 40 percent of this material is used again for new beverage bottles in Germany," Rothhammer describes. The rest is sold by the recyclers to other branches of industry and is processed there, among other things, in T-shirts and sneakers or in car tyres, fruit bowls and park benches.

"But that is unnecessary downcycling," complains the manager in the WELT interview. After all, every single-use plastic bottle can be recycled at least seven or eight times before the polymer chains become too short. "We have to use the circular economy more optimally and to the maximum than is currently happening in Germany," criticizes Rothhammer. This means that CO2 emissions can be noticeably reduced. Coca-Cola, for example, already saves almost 50,000 tons of CO2 per year by using rPET instead of primary raw materials.

This number could be increased even further - if sufficient recycling material was available for bottle production. And theoretically that would be possible, says Rothhammer. Especially since the German one-way deposit system is exemplary. According to statistics, around 97 percent of the disposable containers sold are taken to the deposit machine and thus recycled.

The industry therefore sees it as an unjustified "punishment" that drinks suppliers are covered by the planned disposable plastic fund law despite the deposit system. The background: Manufacturers of certain disposable plastic products are to pay special levies into a state fund administered by the Federal Environment Agency, with the money from which cleaning and disposal costs for public spaces are financed.

Rothhammer, like the bosses of most other beverage manufacturers, rejects demands from environmentalists to completely do without disposables and only offer reusables. "All packaging has its justification," says Gerolsteiner boss Annega. The Dutchman, who has been running the branded water manufacturer from the Eifel for three years, thinks it makes little sense to only offer one type of packaging. "Reusable glass, for example, is really sustainable when it's short distances, but not when the bottles have to be transported over long distances," explains Annega. "Especially when the relatively heavy empties have to be brought back hundreds of kilometers afterwards."

Disposables are often even more environmentally friendly, especially due to the German deposit system. Because by directly shredding the non-returnable bottles, they can be taken to the recycler to save space and, ideally, put into circulation as new bottles. Annega also refers to corresponding consumer habits and desires. "Anyone who goes on an excursion prefers disposable bottles, which are lighter and can be easily handed in anywhere."

At Gerolsteiner, the different types of containers are evenly distributed. Around a third of the sales volume is filled in reusable glass bottles, a third in reusable PET, which has so far been produced without any recyclates, and a third in non-returnable containers, which also include the five-liter canisters for water dispensers, for example. However, the topic of glass has experienced a small boom in recent years, as Annega reports. That is why the medium-sized company, which recently had a turnover of almost 290 million euros and at least eleven percent of buyers in Germany, has also installed three new filling systems for glass bottles in recent years. And it cannot be ruled out that more will be added.

Because Annega still sees growth opportunities for his brand, for example in soft drinks. "We are still below average on this topic," admits the managing director. In fact, less than five percent of the portfolio is in this area. However, the head of the company does not want to set a specific target for the future. Especially since he also sees growth potential for the main product, mineral water, and wants to score with new bottle sizes and different levels of carbonation.

The water bottled in Gerolstein comes from a total of 26 active wells within a radius of 1.5 kilometers around the Vulkanring plant at the entrance to the small town of 8,000 inhabitants. It is bottled over five days, at weekends huge reservoirs buffer the water gushing from a depth of up to 250 meters and already carbonated when it comes out of the ground.

"That's why we don't have a problem with the current issue of a lack of CO2," reports Arnd Büchsenschütz, the manager of process engineering at Gerolsteiner Brunnen. A total of 15 production lines are available, through which up to four million bottles a day have recently run.

And quite a few of them have flaws – and they are intentional. "We have an employee who produces faulty bottles all day and channels them into production to check the safety of the systems," explains Büchsenschütz. With success. "The inspection units of the systems find them all," asserts the expert. However, there are always small explosions in the bottling hall. Because the water is pressed into the bottles with extra pressure. “This is a stress test for the material. And that doesn't always hold up," explains Büchsenschütz. "But it's better if the bottles burst right here with us than later in the customer's trunk."

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