2017 PETCO Awards celebrate the champions behind PET recycling in South Africa
Published: Thursday, June 8, 2017
The extraordinary contributions to PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) recycling in South Africa during the course of 2016 by 10 individuals and companies were celebrated at an awards ceremony as part of the PETCO Annual General Meeting, which was held on 07 June at the Radisson Blu Sandton Hotel in Johannesburg.
The PETCO awards are designed to recognise individuals, organisations and companies that contribute significantly to advancing PET recycling, whilst reflecting the principles of Extended Producer Responsibility and circular economy-thinking in their practices.
“At PETCO, our greatest asset is the remarkable network of partners we work with every day,” says PETCO CEO, Cheri Scholtz. “As such, we are delighted to be able to recognise and celebrate the significant efforts made by our 10 worthy award winners during the course of 2016 towards the recycling of post-consumer PET in South Africa.”
The 2017 PETCO Award winners are:
- Best Recycling Public Education Programme – The Waste Trade Company and White Sharks Project Recycle Swop Shop.
- Best product using recycled PET - The Joinery, for ‘My Office’ range.
- Recycling Partnership Game Changer - Pikitup.
- Recycling Innovator of the Year - Extrupet (Pty) Ltd.
- Best Community Breakthrough Initiative - Reliving Cop17.
- PET-trepreneur - Nokubonga Mnyango, owner of Uthando Solutions and Trading (Pty) Ltd. and Maxwell Ndlovu, owner of Okuhle Waste Management.
- Top Women in Recycling - Charlotte Lamprecht, owner of Henque Waste.
- Media Spotlight award - Sindy Peters, Managing Editor at Bizcommunity.com.
This year’s awards, which formed part of the company’s 12th AGM, emphasised the remarkable achievements realised in 2016. In its latest results, PETCO reports that the organisation recycled 55% of post-consumer bottle PET, equating to 2 billion PET bottles collected for recycling across South Africa over the course of 2016 and creating some 62 000 income opportunities.
Financed by a voluntary recycling fee paid annually by members, PETCO has collected over 500 000 tonnes of post-consumer PET bottles for recycling since its incorporation in 2004, saving almost 800 000 tonnes of carbon and over 3 million m3 of landfill space.
Scholtz concludes, “While this is an extremely proud accomplishment for PETCO, we could not have achieved this without the dedicated network of people we work with that have enabled PETCO to expand our collection network, build relationships with recyclers, seek new opportunities to develop and support entrepreneurs, and ultimately grow our recycling tonnages.”