- PET trays are valuable recyclable products.
- PET bottles and trays must not be mixed to enable more efficient recycling.
- Future investments will permit better recycling of trays.
PET trays must have their own recycling stream. These valuable products need to be sorted separately from the PET bottle streams and recycled separately in order to ensure resource efficiency.
Casper van den Dungen, Plastics Recyclers Europe PET Chairman, said that “trays and bottles are two different types of products which cannot be recycled in the same recycling line. Their designs and chemical compositions are not the same and can create quality problems for existing PET recyclers.”
“The collection schemes and sorting centres cannot push this issue down the value chain” added Casper van den Dungen. The 700,000 tonnes of PET trays yearly consumed in Europe can be recycled as valuable material if they are properly separated from other streams such as PET bottles or polyolefins. This trend will enable investments in lines able to recycle trays and improve Europe’s resource efficiency.
Plastics Recyclers Europe calls for a joint value chain approach to recycle valuable PET trays and warns about one-sided actions that could endanger the recycling of one of the most recycled plastics in Europe.
