Interview: High tide of post-consumer PET bottle recycling continues

The report “Global plastic bottle recycling market research report 2021”, added on marketreportsworld.com recently, forecasts the global plastic bottle recycling market (valued at US$3673 million in 2020) to reach US$6105.9 million by the end of 2027, growing at a CAGR of 7.5% during 2021-2027.

In particular, PET bottle recycling witnessed a rapid growth and is anticipated to continue growing. PET has become the most favorable material for beverage packaging, and bottle-to-bottle recycling technology of post-consumer PET packaging materials has made a remarkable progress in recent years.

Sought-after larger and high-end machines

Starlinger is a leading supplier of bottle-to-bottle recycling equipment, which witnessed the change of requirements of the machines in the past two years, and one of the phenomenal changes is the larger size of the machines.

As Commercial Head of Starlinger recycling technology Paul Niedl pointed out, the company mainly installed projects with 10,000-15,000 tpa capacity in the past but 20,000-25,000 tpa now.

Nevertheless, he does not expect the capacities to rise beyond 25,000 or 30,000 tpa due to logistics restraints of the recycling facilities.

Another emerging trend observed is the increasing demand for high quality machines.

“Over the years we became well known for high-end rPET chip quality. Whereas in previous years there was also interest in our entry level equipment, nowadays there is only interest in the high-end solutions,” he said.

PET bottle recycling technology has been advanced swiftly.

The Austrian-based supplier also builds machines for the woven plastic bag sector and develops solutions to produce woven bags from recycled PET bottles and post-consumer big bags.

At present, about a third of post-consumer PET bottles are recycled for applications in the textile industry. It is good in the first loop as it saves raw materials, but it is a “dead end” in most cases as textiles are mostly polyester-cotton mixtures, Paul Niedl commented when talking about upcycling PET efficiently.

“This makes it impossible to recycle them with mechanical recycling technologies, and it is also not feasible with chemical recycling technologies,” he noted.

He urged policy makers to work on regulations, such as quotas and minimum recycling content, to prevent such kind of downcycling.

Still limited food-grade PCR plastic applications

Although rPET has been gaining more applications, Paul Niedl thinks that the applications of food-grade PCR plastics are still quite limited currently and there is huge potential for these circular materials.

“The main limiting factor is the absence of realistic food contact decontamination limits for PE applications,” he commented. “The EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) is clearly lacking behind its US counterpart FDA which has realistic levels in place that allows the HDPE food contact recycling sector to grow.”

As we understand, the FDA requires submission of test results that prove the HDPE recycling process reduces potential contaminants to certain limits that do not pose risk to human health. The EFSA, however, has no final assessment for the recycling of HDPE food contact materials.

Paul Niedl remarked another challenge that raw material price rallies with ups and downs. “The regranulate price develops separately as the costs of collection and recycling process are not swinging with the price of chemical polymer building blocks,” he explained.

In his opinion, unless there is either political pressure based on mandatory recycling content or strong demand from FMCG brand owners that is based on positive consumer perception of recycling, the recycling industry will not be able to grow to the levels required by EU recycling quotas.

Besides, he suggests to further strengthen communication and lobbying work in the consumer market as “most of the consumers are not aware that there is recycling technology out there that provides pellets safe for direct food contact”.

Meanwhile, Starlinger will continue develop solutions for food contact recycled plastics which are not limited to rPET, as well as technology for odor reduction of PCR plastics.

With Starlinger’s odor reduction technology, post-consumer plastics can be turned into high-quality recycled material.

Design for Recycling leads to successful packaging recycling

Paul Niedl also underscored the significance of DfR (Design for Recycling) in successful packaging recycling. “We need mono-material instead of multi-material, extrusion laminating instead of glue, stronger materials instead of many layers, vacuuming or gas technology instead of multi-material packaging to increase the shelf life of food,” he said.

He further noted that the industry, over decades, has “over-engineered” plastic packaging to create even longer shelf life that nobody actually needs, and in return, the multi-layer/multi-material packaging cannot be recyclable, or at least not in a feasible way.

Packaging also needs to be designed in a way for easy label removal on drinking bottles, he added.

In addition, Paul Niedl brought up the issue of the anti-plastic trend with creating wood-paper-glue-plastic packaging connections. “Consumers think it is green because plastic was reduced or totally avoided, but in reality this packaging is hard or impossible to be recycled,” he explained.

Bag-to-bag rPP solutions for FIBC sector

Another focus of Starlinger on circular packaging is bag-to-bag rPP solutions for post-consumer big bags. It has built the rPP project team to map out the requirements and challenges to promote circular packaging in the FIBC (flexible intermediate bulk container) sector.

Used big bags can be recycled with Starlinger’s PP recycling technology.

The company focuses on both the recycling and fabric production processes in the machine-related developments, and has by far achieved good results with rPP.

According to Project Manager-rPP Andreas Anderl, it is possible to supplement more than 50% of the virgin PP with rPP using the company’s technology. Same technical parameters can be achieved without any loss in strength or increased material usage.