Securing a strategic material: why PET production matters from a Belgian perspective, Bill Ozturk, Group CEO, JBF Global Europe BV

Visit the Antwerp-Laakdal industrial cluster and you are looking at one of Europe's most significant concentrations of advanced chemical manufacturing. At its center sits JBF Global Europe's PET resin facility - the newest, largest-scale plant of its kind on the continent. From our site in Laakdal, PET is not an abstract material: it keeps water, soft drinks, juices, medicines, and food products safe and shelf-stable across the European market, with a carbon footprint around 80 percent lower than glass or aluminum, backed by one of Europe's most established recycling systems.

Yet domestic PET production is not consistently treated as an industrial priority. For operators like us, that gap is becoming increasingly visible.

A critical material in a distorted market

Around 40 percent of European PET demand is met by imports, a structural dependency in supply chains where substitution is not a realistic short-term option. Food safety and regulatory standards severely constrain alternatives.

"At our site, we internalize the full cost of compliance. Where these obligations are absent elsewhere, market prices do not reflect comparable standards, and this cannot be offset by efficiency alone."

Our facility faces significantly higher energy costs, carbon pricing under the ETS, and stringent environmental regulation. Producers in other regions operate with lower input costs, fewer carbon constraints, and in some cases government-subsidized systems. The result is a persistent cost asymmetry that has weighed on European utilisation rates and margins since mid-2022. Recent developments reinforce the imbalance: Türkiye - a major PET exporter - has introduced provisional safeguard measures to protect its own domestic production, while exports continue to flow into Europe unimpeded.

More than a factory

JBF's Belgian facility is co-located with INEOS Aromatics, securing feedstock and reducing supply chain risk. It connects to the Port of Antwerp and sustains approximately 850 direct and indirect Belgian jobs across logistics, maintenance, and downstream processing. These are not interchangeable roles - they reflect accumulated expertise and local economic anchors built over time. When one part of the Antwerp-Laakdal cluster weakens, the resilience of the whole system is affected.

The circular economy depends on domestic capability

The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation sets demanding recycled content targets, including 30 percent by 2030. Meeting these targets requires not just collection systems, but domestic production capacity capable of processing and deploying recycled material at scale.

At our Laakdal facility, we have invested in integrated rPET capability - a single-pellet solution with up to 30 percent recycled content, precisely what brand owners need for compliance. These capabilities are the result of sustained investment. Once lost, they are slow and costly to rebuild.

"Replacing locally produced PET with imports manufactured under less stringent environmental regimes risks increasing overall emissions, even where recycling performance improves."

A credible low-carbon, circular packaging system depends on maintaining production capacity aligned with the same standards it is designed to serve. The recent disruption of key maritime routes - including the Strait of Hormuz - has further underscored the risks of intercontinental supply chain dependence for essential materials.

From policy ambition to operating reality

Europe's stated ambitions on competitiveness, circularity, and climate point in the right direction. But the interaction between trade, energy, and carbon policy creates real and immediate challenges for assets like ours. Materials such as PET underpin food packaging, pharmaceuticals, and circular economy delivery. Maintaining domestic production capacity is directly linked to the ability to deliver on these broader objectives in practice.

The tools to address these challenges already exist. The question is how consistently they are applied - particularly for materials that may not attract the same visibility as other sectors but remain essential to the functioning of the economy.

From our vantage point in Laakdal, the picture is clear. The investment and scale are there. The capability is there. What is needed now is a policy environment that recognises both the strategic value of that capacity, and the real conditions under which it must compete – for the benefit of Belgium, and of Europe.

Bill Ozturk is Group CEO of JBF Global Europe, operator of Europe's most modern PET resin production facility, located in the Antwerp-Laakdal industrial cluster in Belgium.