Colruyt, a Belgian supermarket chain, launches the first meat trays made with chemically-recycled polystyrene from collected yogurt pots and foam trays from PMD bags. The new packaging has been available on store shelves starting in October 2025.

Colruyt launches first food foam trays with 10% chemically recycled material.

Chemical recycling for new possibility of sustainable food packaging

Foam trays are made from XPS, or extruded polystyrene. This is the same plastic family as, for example, yogurt pots made from PS or polystyrene. Although this type of packaging has been sorted and recycled from PMD bag for some time, recycled material from mechanical recycling may not be used for packaging for direct food contact.

Thanks to Plastics2Chemicals, a chemical recycling technology at Indaver's new factory Antwerp, Belgium, these packaging waste can be recycled and transformed into foam trays.

Plastics2Chemicals has a total capacity of 26,000 tons. By 2025, the plant was already processing sorted polystyrene and extruded polystyrene from PMD bags on an industrial scale.

Through thermal depolymerization (heat) and distillation (purification), the PS packaging waste is converted into base chemicals. The final product has very high purity, equivalent to virgin material.

In 2026, Plastics2Chemicals will also begin recycling packaging films from PMD bags, such as snack packaging and outer packaging. The total investment in the new site is about EUR 75 million.

Sorting, recycling and producing in one country

The collected yogurt pots and foam trays from PMD bags is processed at Indaver's new Plastics2Chemicals facility in Antwerp, Belgium. A total of approximately 66 tons of recycled polystyrene is used to produce the dark grey foam trays with 10% recycled content.

“In 2023, Colruyt was the first chain to stop using black foam trays, so that empty packaging placed in the PMD bags could be correctly sorted and therefore recycled. Today, we’re the first to reuse recycled material from foam trays and yoghurt pots in our packaging. This means we need fewer and fewer new raw materials for our packaging, which reduces our environmental impact,” said Ludo Vanderelst, Responsible Buyer at Colruyt Group