TOLUCA - Mexico has opened the first plant in Latin America to make new soft drink bottles from old ones, hoping to double its recycling of PET plastic and dent an atrocious record for dealing with household waste.
Mexicans are the world's biggest guzzlers of sugary drinks and go through more PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles than anywhere else except the United States, but only recycle a fraction, turning them into carpets or clothing.
Opening the new "bottle-to-bottle" plant this week, Environment Minister Jose Luis Luege said Mexico now hoped to recycle 20 percent of the PET bottles that end up clogging landfill sites or defacing beaches, rivers and countryside.
"We have one of the lowest garbage recycling rates in the world, not even one percent. The problem is we generate an enormous quantity of rubbish and we do not have a culture of recycling," Luege told reporters after touring the plant.
Like many developing countries, Mexico has overlooked its ballooning waste as it focused on expanding its economy. Separate bins to sort household waste are only just being introduced in the capital, and northern Mexico is sullied by mountains of old tires and waste from electronic goods factories.
Luege said only 17 out of 2,445 municipalities in Mexico deal properly with household waste. Most of it ends up in open rubbish pits or strewn along roadsides in makeshift dumps.
Left lying around, PET bottles provide breeding grounds for malaria- and Dengue Fever-carrying mosquitoes
The new plant, the biggest of its kind in the world, will munch up 25,000 tons of PET bottles per year and churn out 15,000 tons of pure PET to be made into new bottles, leaving behind bottle tops, labels, dirt and other residue.
"That's double the amount currently recycled in Mexico and it's 25,000 tons that would go into landfills," said Neville Isdell, chief executive of Coca-Cola Co., a partner in the plant.
The plant, near the city of Toluca, will raise the number of PET bottles collected by providing a market for the "pepenadores" who root through rubbish dumps looking for recyclable waste and who currently receive much more cash for glass and aluminum.
Luege said the goal for 2005 was to buy back 2.2 billion of the 9 billion PET bottles consumed versus around 1.8 billion collected for recycling in 2004, already up from past years.
The $20 million plant, run by Coca-Cola, Mexican bottler and brewer Femsa and Austrian bottle maker Alpla, can chomp through 90,000 grimy, squashed bottles an hour.
It subjects them to high-pressure air currents, alkaline solution rinses, high-speed spinning and temperatures of 350 degrees Fahrenheit (177 degrees Celsius) to strip away grit, oil, glass and metal shards, labels and tops, which are made from a harder plastic.
The waste collects in long hanging sacks like giant vacuum cleaner bags while flakes of recycled PET are carted off by Alpla to be mixed in a 20:80 ratio with new PET and made into bottles.
Story by Catherine Bremer
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
