Mexico City — Greenback Recycling Technologies Ltd. plans to open 300 plants in the next two decades to handle flexible packaging, including hard-to-recycle plastic-aluminum laminates, its founder and CEO says.
Half of them would be built in Latin America, 10 percent in Africa and Asia and the rest in Europe, Philippe von Stauffenberg told Plastics News in a June 1 telephone interview.
"It does not necessarily mean that we will build them ourselves," von Stauffenberg added. "They could be built under license. They can be modularized. Eighty percent of the parts are off the shelf."
London-based Greenback's first fully commercial facility officially opened in the town of Cuautla, southern Mexico, on May 25, using microwave-induced technology developed by Enval Ltd. of Alconbury, England.
Asked whether Greenback would continue to use Enval technology, von Stauffenberg replied: "We own Enval." He said that Greenback bought a stake in Enval about three years ago "and now we own almost 100 percent of them. We intend to use only Enval until a better alternative comes along."
The entrepreneur, who founded Greenback in 2018, said that "pyrolysis is not the only recycling mechanism but it is the best available at the moment."
The advantage of pyrolysis, he said, was the avoidance of water usage "as water is scarce in many countries."
Referring to Greenback's development of a digital certification system for waste, called eco2Veritas, von Stauffenberg, a Harvard Business School-educated son of German diplomats, noted that what had impressed Nestlé de México SA de CV, an affiliate of Swiss food giant Nestlé SA, the most and persuaded it to invest in the Cuautla project "was our ability to prove the origin of [our] waste."
Nestlé de México contributed a quarter of the cost of building the Cuautla operation after asking Greenback to construct it, von Stauffenberg said.
On the question of which consumer goods companies will follow Nestlé's example and build recycling facilities similar to the one in Cuautla, von Stauffenberg said: "We are probably in touch with the top 20 CGCs."
Von Stauffenberg said eco2Veritas "keeps people from making false claims." Asked for examples as to how such claims could be made, he said: "In the past, you just relied on audits, PRNs (Packaging Recovery Notes)."
He was asked whether the Greenback certification system is foolproof: "It's a much better system than anything we have seen out there," he replied."
After working "for many years" in the plastic recycling industry, according to a Greenback news release, von Stauffenberg "became frustrated with the manifest cheating and greenwashing and with the lack of a practical solution to the problem of flexible plastic packaging. He founded Greenback to address these challenges."
Latin America generated 29 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2020, according to Inter-American Development Bank research, referred to by Greenback.
"We estimate that about a third of this is flexible plastic packaging that we could recycle — so around 10 million metric tons annually," the company has said.
