The story
The company was founded in 1955 as "Alpenplastik Lehner Alwin OHG" by the brothers Alwin (1932-2018) and Helmuth Lehner (1930-1978). After starting with the injection moulding production of plastic cups, ALPLA produced plastic bottles for the first time in 1958. In the same year, the company began mechanical engineering and developed the Alplamat, the first extrusion blow moulding machine for the production of plastic bottles. The company's first international site was opened in Markdorf, Germany, in 1964, followed by San Joaquin in Venezuela in 1968.
Since 1985, ALPLA has also been producing packaging directly at customers' bottling plants. The first in-house plant was opened at the Henkel company in Lomazzo. In the same year, ALPLA developed the first two-stage PET bottle and replaced the plastic PVC with PET. This was followed in 1990 by the development of bottles made from recycled plastic. After 42 years, founder Alwin Lehner handed over the management of the company to his son Günther Lehner in 1997. Ten years later, ALPLA opened its 100th plant in Shanghai. ALPLA is still family-owned today and has been managed by third-generation CEO Philipp Lehner since 2021.
ALPLA has been operating recycling plants since becoming the majority shareholder of the Austrian PET Recycling Team GmbH (PRT) in 2010. As a joint venture partner of The Coca-Cola Company, the company has held a stake in a Mexican recycling plant since 2005. Currently (2023), the international recycling network includes 13 plants, including 4 joint ventures, in 9 countries: Germany, Italy, Mexico, Austria, Poland, Romania, Spain, South Africa and Thailand. The installed and projected annual recycling capacity worldwide is 266,000 tons of recycled PET (rPET) and 84,000 tons of recycled HDPE (rHDPE). In 2023, the company founded its own recycling division, ALPLArecycling.
Since 2016, ALPLA has also been producing cleanroom-certified bottles, containers and closures for the pharmaceutical industry. ALPLApharma division was founded in 2019. ALPLA also entered the market for canisters and buckets in 2021 with the acquisition of the Austrian packaging company Wolf Plastics and founded the ALPLAindustrial brand in 2023. The injection moulding business has been bundled in the ALPLAinject division since 2024.
From Wikipedia’s article on Alpla, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5