With TOMRA Recycling’s flakes solutions, Cirrec BV, part of the Faerch Group and located in Duiven, The Netherlands, has achieved true circularity in food packaging by transforming post-consumer PET packaging back into new food-grade trays of the same high quality.

The Cirrec plant in Duiven processes and recycles post-consumer PET plastic waste. In 2024, multiple TOMRA flake sorting units were installed, significantly advancing the plant's capabilities and performance.

Cirrec, part of the Faerch Group, operates state-of-the-art recycling facility in Duiven, The Netherlands.

Recycling post-consumer PET trays presents unique and significant challenges compared to PET bottles. Unlike relatively clean bottle bales, used trays contain significant and variable contamination. This makes achieving high purity levels exceptionally difficult, especially once the material is ground into flakes.

TOMRA’s flake systems for food-grade tray-to-tray recycling

TOMRA’s flake systems support separating mixed-color and natural content to ensure a very high level of purity, enabling the material to be used for new food-grade trays.

Cirrec invested in a new line featuring TOMRA Recycling’s INNOSORT FLAKE and AUTOSORT FLAKE.

TOMRA offers multiple advanced flake sorting machines, including INNOSORT FLAKE and AUTOSORT FLAKE units. The INNOSORT FLAKE is designed for sorting diverse plastic flakes by polymer and color, including transparent and opaque materials, even from highly contaminated input streams.

The AUTOSORT FLAKE is a higher-performance solution specifically tailored for high-purity applications. It is capable of removing significant quantities of metal, foreign polymers such as PVC and PC and other materials like wood, silicone and rubber.

This technology is crucial for Cirrec’s multi-stage process, which involves pre-sorting, washing, drying and then sophisticated flake sorting to obtain pure clear and colored PET flakes.

High capacity and purity

Supported by TOMRA's technology, the new line has doubled the capacity of the previous line while at the same time delivering a higher quality output. Combined with the existing upgraded line, the plant now boasts a total processing capacity of 60,000 tons per year of post-consumer PET food trays.

The sorted PET clear and color flakes are used by Cirrec to produce Pellets for the manufacture of new food-grade trays.

The sorted PET clear and PET color trays flakes are used internally by Cirrec to produce pellets for manufacturing new trays within the Faerch Group, containing up to 70% recycled content. While the material is currently for internal consumption only, the potential exists to build other new lines across Europe, further expanding this circular model.