Wirtschaftsforum: Mrs. Walker, Resilux's core competence has primarily been in the production of plastic bottles and the necessary preforms - recently, however, the focus of your company has shifted to closing the raw material cycles associated with it.

Wirtschaftsforum: Your facility in Bilten is generally considered the most modern PET bottle recycling plant in Europe.

Jana Walker: I have never checked the exact figures behind it because it is completely irrelevant for our day-to-day business. We are certainly not the largest provider, but we unquestionably supply renowned companies with the highest quality standards, and we are technically capable of producing PET bottles that are made from 100% recycled material. This is possible today, but it requires understanding the underlying processes in the utmost detail and being able to implement them reliably so that a fully carefree application in the food context is feasible. The constant willingness to invest and the associated innovative strength of Resilux are indispensable prerequisites for consistently meeting these standards.

Wirtschaftsforum: What part of the value chain does your company exactly occupy?

Jana Walker: According to the Federal Office for the Environment, 83% of all PET beverage bottles in Switzerland are collected and recycled – this first step is financed by the advance recycling fee, which has proven to be one of the most efficient and cost-effective systems. The bottles collected in this context are then sent to one of three sorting plants in Switzerland before they finally reach us as the operators of the recycling plant, after some decontamination has already occurred.

We then perform another precise check to ensure that it is indeed a PET bottle of the correct color before proceeding to the next steps where the labels are removed and the bottles along with the caps are soaked in a flotation tank. Subsequently, chemical washing and drying processes take place, before finally, after extrusion, new PET material is created, from which our preformers are made, which then form the basis for the new PET bottles. Thus, we can now represent a closed loop under one roof at one location.
 

Wirtschaftsforum: To what extent is this approach – aside from a better sustainability record – also economically sensible?

Jana Walker: Indeed, it is sometimes overlooked in this discourse that the circular economy, compared to traditional linear value creation, comes with tangible financial benefits - especially for a country with few natural resources like Switzerland. The bottles collected and subsequently refurbished here remain in the country and are permanently available to the local cycle. This makes our entire national economy less vulnerable to supply chain disruptions or material shortages. The upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic have clearly shown that local value creation is of essential importance in times of crisis to consistently act as a reliable partner in the market. By closing the loops in the PET sector, this is now also possible in our segment.

Wirtschaftsforum: Where do you see the greatest potential for further development in the coming years?

Jana Walker: Today, many of our processes are already highly automated. In particular, for the sorting of bottles, we have been using appropriate AI for many years. These technologies will certainly be extensively developed further together with our partners. At the same time, integrating our site, which actually comes from waste processing, into the Resilux Group was not trivial at the organizational level, and defining a common culture that we can convey internally and externally as a group certainly involved a good deal of effort. Now, we want to grow further from this consolidated position of strength to achieve an even higher impact in plastic recycling.