OCTAL’s New plant will leverage current customer base to recycle PET Sheet waste

The virgin PET sheet market in North America is currently estimated to be 410k tons and expected to reach 427k tons by 2016, growing annually at 1.4% over 2013-2016. Contrastingly, the recycled sheet segment is currently estimated to be 507k tons and expected to reach 645k tons by 2016 (Source: PCI, 2012), growing annually at 8.4% over the same period. With rPET, OCTAL US aims to chase this fast-growing rPET sheet market, focusing primarily on agriculture sector, a segment not catered extensively by the DPET sheet.

The Project site has been selected, based on a rigourous “Site Screening Study” with more than total production capacity of the projects has already received interest. The rPET sheet will be manufactured using a combination of post industrial PET flake and resin. The low reuse of post-consumer waste bottle flake in the bottle industry will also provide additional flake supply to the rPET extrusion market.

The Project provides an alternative manufacturing base for OCTAL’s products, thereby providing a contingent back-up for Salalah facility and allows catering to short lead-time products, which would otherwise be sourced from domestic competitors.

This OCTAL project also offers an opportunity for future capacity enhancement, as the site has spare space available to accommodate additional extrusion lines. Moreover, China’s ‘Green Fence’ campaign that has restricted the influx of waste from abroad has created an opportunity for rPET sheet extrusion in US, by reducing the PET flake and bale cost. OCTAL US is scheduled to commence commercial operations in later half of 2014.

Source: OCTAL