Packaging maker Tetra Pak has announced an ambitious three-year, 100 million euros ($118.8 million) project to expand a plant in France and transition production to tethered caps.
The Châteaubriant-based closures production facility will stop making conventional caps in favor of the tethered caps that will be required in multiple regions thorughout late 2021 thorugh 2023. The project is expected to wrap up by 2024.
The investment will be spread over two phases. The first will begin in late 2021, where the company will enlarge the industrial site to accommodate a 30 percent increase in manufacturing capacity through the installation of 10 additional lines that will be dedicated to the production of tethered caps. Between 2022 and 2023, approximately 50 percent of the existing lines will be replaced, again to ensure the company will be able to meet its food and beverage customers' anticipated demand for tethered caps.
The project, which comes on top of the company's commitment to invest another 100 million euros per year over the next 5-10 years to develop more sustainable packaging solutions, is essential to ensure that Tetra Pak's customers in Europe will be ready to comply with the Single Use Plastics (SUP) Directive, an integral part of the wider approach announced in the Plastics Strategy and an important element of the European Union's Circular Economy Action Plan.
The Châteaubriant plant is a key manufacturing facility for Tetra Pak, serving food and beverage manufacturers globally, with a production capacity of approximately 5 billion caps in 2020. Having earned an RSB Advanced Products certificate last year from the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials, the factory is able to create packaging with certified recycled polyethylene polymers produced according to the RSB Chain of Custody mass balance attribution method.
Tetra Pak is the first company in the F&B packaging industry to be awarded the RSB Advanced Products certification. Today, the site covers an area of over 30,000 square meters and features 19 lines dedicated to the manufacture of six types of caps.
Tetra Pak is part of Swiss-based Tetra Laval.