Plastics Recyclers Europe (EuPR), a trade body representing the plastics recycling industry, has said it will develop a set of PET recycling guidelines for PET trays.
The first set of guidelines will enable the value chain to assess the recyclability of the products which are put on the market and move towards recyclable PET trays. The second set will detail how separate sorting streams will have to be created to enable PET tray recycling.
As some non-PET trays have similar issues EuPR will also develop guidelines for trays made of other plastics.
Significant increase in PET trays
According to EuPR, over the past few years there has been a ‘significant increase’ in the amount of PET trays used in packaging. This, it says, is something which has not been ‘adequately’ addressed in their end-of-life solutions, and as a result most of these trays cannot be easily recycled.
Indeed, none of the current UK recycling streams are happy to accept PET trays in their incoming waste. PET recyclers cannot handle them because of their different composition (multi-layers, multi-material combinations etc.) when compared to beverage bottles, whereas mixed plastics recyclers do not want them because of their incompatibility with polyolefins.
As a consequence of this, the 700,000 tonnes of PET trays annually placed on the market are not recycled, when, EuPR says, they should be a ‘valuable resource for the EU’.
Designing for recyclability
The key factor to change this market reality is to act at the design stage of this product, says EuPR.
It says that industry must evolve in order to maintain and grow the market for this packaging product, without which, the PET market could be replaced by ‘more resource efficient solutions’.
EuPR said that recyclers and stakeholders have voiced a willingness to further develop the guidelines that are being created by EuPR, as ’alltrays have an important packaging function but need adapt to recyclability requirements in order to grow in the years to come’.
EuPR has repeatedly called for PET trays to be recycled from bottles, claiming last year that mixing trays with more valuable bottles ‘could endanger the recycling of one of the most recycled plastics in Europe’.
Read more about EuPR’s efforts.
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