Recycling PET trays at scale is one of the most demanding challenges in plastics recycling. The combination of complex structures, mixed input streams and strict quality requirements leaves little margin for error – particularly when the objective is to turn post-consumer trays back into new food trays. More than five million tons of PET packaging enter the European market annually. While bottle-to-bottle recycling is already well established, PET trays – representing roughly 25% of this volume – remain a vast untapped resource. Scaling tray-to-tray recycling is therefore both a technical challenge and a strategic imperative for advancing circularity in PET packaging. This is precisely where Sulayr Recycling focuses its expertise.
Day by day, the company is building a recycling model that is unique in the world and based on real circularity: keeping transparent PET trays in a closed loop and returning them to the market as new, food-grade trays. This transparent-to-transparent, tray-to-tray recycling approach for complex, multilayer thermoformed PET trays is the strategic backbone of Sulayr’s operations, ensuring full traceability and food-grade compliance.
Currently serving over 100 customers across Europe, Sulayr produced more than 50,000 tons of recycled PET in 2025 alone – equivalent to a production capacity of over four million trays per day.
To maintain this momentum on an industrial scale while meeting increasingly strict market and regulatory demands, Sulayr recognized the need to further enhance process stability and sorting precision. This led the company to seek a technology partner capable of supporting its next phase of growth.
A challenging input amid rising expectations
The material Sulayr processes is primarily sourced from post-consumer PET tray streams via Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) systems. Depending on its origin and the time of year, this input material varies significantly and often includes other PET types, multilayer structures and polymer contaminants.
“As quality requirements evolved, stability became just as critical as purity,” explains Sergio Collado, Chief Technology Officer at Sulayr. “For tray-to-tray applications, you need a process that delivers consistent results every single day – not just under ideal conditions.”
A shared responsibility for results
To achieve this level of consistency, Sulayr engaged TOMRA Recycling as a strategic partner to co-design and optimize the sorting process.
TOMRA’s involvement went far beyond equipment selection: they provided expert consultancy on optimal machine positioning and the essential pre-treatment steps required to ensure material reaches the sorting units in peak condition. The objective was to engineer a stable, scalable process architecture rather than simply installing standalone machines.
“This was far from a standard supplier relationship,” says Jesús Espinar, Area Sales Manager at TOMRA Recycling. “We collaborated closely with Sulayr to align with their targets, material characteristics and operational constraints. Our shared responsibility was to design a process that performs reliably and consistently delivers the high quality required by current European regulatory standards, while providing the flexibility to adapt as those requirements become even more stringent in the future.”
Technology integrated into the process
The core of the solution is a dual-track AUTOSORT™ and an INNOSORT™ FLAKE system, both fully integrated into Sulayr’s industrial configuration. The process chain incorporates material reception, optical sorting at tray level, washing, grinding, flake purification and final extrusion into tray-grade rPET.
At the tray level, the dual-track AUTOSORT™ – a multifunctional sorting allrounder – is critical for managing the high complexity of the input material. Its unique configuration enables two independent sorting steps within a single unit. In the first track, PET Clear/Light Blue (CLB) is positively ejected from the mixed stream. In the second track, the remaining non-target materials are removed through negative sorting, where contaminants are ejected to leave a high-purity final product. This combination maximizes both recovery and final purity while maintaining high throughput.
