A six-year project in France to develop a recycling solution for monolayer and multilayer food packaging PET trays has led to a new technology that makes it possible to process the monolayer trays into a recycled product that is suitable for new tray production.
With the support of the French not-for-profit organisation Citeo, Indorama-owned Wellman France Recycling and Valorplast, a company specialised in the collection and management of household plastic packaging, collaborated for six years on the project. During that period, Valorplast was responsible for the collection of quantities of post-consumer PET trays, while Wellman conducted a number of industrial runs. The flakes produced through the process have been tested by several actors in order to explore the quality and potentially possible applications for this material.
The outcome of these tests has now enabled a commercially feasible, circular recycling solution for monolayer PET trays to be developed by the project’s participants, who are now working with Klöckner Pentaplast on its further implementation.
“We will be using this flake as part of our kp Tray2Tray initiative to include recycled content in our food packaging trays for the fresh food sector across Europe,” said Adam Barnett, President of the Food Packaging Division at Klöckner Pentaplast.
The new technology is expected to result in over 50 million post-consumer PET trays being diverted away from landfill or incineration in the future.
The project is still working on solutions for multilayer PET trays, noted Catherine Klein, general director of Valorplast.
But the new technology means that, for the first time, ‘we have a circular recycling solution for PET tray packaging’ said François Lagrue, head of operations – Europe, Indorama Ventures Recycling Group, which will lend significant support in realising the EU’s plastic collection and recycling targets.
“This is a true value circle effort. Tests were performed at all levels, including sorting, recycling and conversion,” said Lagrue. “Ensuring the input met the right quality and purity levels is our top priority. Development of tray recycling has been a goal for some time. We are proud that – together with our partners – we have been able to develop a commercially and technically feasible process, that allows us to produce a dedicated rPET flake product for the food packaging market.”
Testing has now moved into commercial production. 500 tonnes of PET trays are now being processed monthly and transformed into a high-quality tray flake, which can be used to produce new trays. The purity of the flakes is comparable with high-quality bottle flake. A further scale-up is foreseen, and the company plans to process 10KT of tray flake in 2022.
Indorama Ventures Public Company Limited (IVL) is the biggest PET producer and, since its acquisition of Wellman International in 2011, has also grown into one of the biggest PET recyclers in the world, producing bottle flakes, rPET and recycled fibres. Since 2011, with IVL has been recycling PET bottles into clear PET flakes for fibre, sheet and bottle applications. Its latest acquisition in this areas was an 85% equity stake in Czech Republic-based PET plastic recycler, UCY Polymers CZ, an investment designed to boost that country’s and Europe’s plastic collection and recycling ambitions. IVL has pledged to invest US$1.5 billion towards achieving the goal of recycling 750,000 tons of post-consumer PET materials as feedback into its own polymer production per year by 2025.