Breaking technical bottlenecks in PET/PP tray recycling
Boretech Environment Engineering Co., Ltd., Hall 9 – Booth D56
PET tray recycling has long been a challenge for the plastics recycling industry. Highly compacted bales, excessive adhesive labels and glue, complex material compositions, and the inherent brittleness of trays have limited both process efficiency and yield. At K 2025, Boretech will present its PET tray recycling process, a purpose-designed solution that breaks through four key bottlenecks and delivers four core technological advancements.
Boretech assigns four core technological solutions:
- Thorough material loosening: High-efficiency de-baling and pre-washing system ensures thorough loosening of highly compacted bales.
- Intensive hot washing: >90% removal and separation rate of adhesive labels and impurities.
- Mega aspirator: Film labels and flakes are separated with >99% accuracy and <1% flake carryover rate.
- Enhanced yield: Cut tray recycling loss to 20% with our low impact de-watering tech – engineered to dehydrate rapidly without compromising material value.
Smart modular technology
The system is based on a customisable modular design, tailored to different material mixes. PET tray flake quality meets food-grade rPET standards, compliant with FDA & EFSA requirements (flakes with adhesive: < 2,000 ppm and PVC content: < 50 ppm).
The de-balling & pre-hot washing module is composed of a mechanical and thermal de-baling process, loosening highly compacted tray bales while pre-washing and thoroughly de-baling the materials. This enables effective downstream automatic sorting. The module features a water circulation system removing impurities for inline recycling.
Boretech explains that the wet crushing module utilises wet crushing technology. This process intensively washes materials during crushing while significantly reducing fine generation, minimising raw material loss, and extending crusher blade service-life. Featuring a patented low-loss design, the centrifugal dryer minimises mechanical impact on materials to prevent fragmentation. This achieves virtually zero fine generation during extended operation, while adjustable residence time ensures optimal dehydration, says the company.
An intensive hot washing module delivers thorough, intensive washing and friction against the material, achieving 25% higher impurity removal. It fully removes large adhesive labels from trays’ surface. The integrated inline detergent circulation system separates adhesives and impurities via filtration, and the detergent is for inline recycling.
In the high-speed rinsing module, a rotating shaft generates intense turbulence, removing residual alkali and micro-adhesives from the material. The long flotation path ensures separation of floating impurities.
In the flake sorting and packing module, the mega aspirator employs multiple parallel air separation channels to remove 99% of film labels with high sorting efficiency and low flake carryover rates. Residual coloured flakes and other materials are then removed through colour and material sorting.
Prior to the K show Boretech announced that it will open a PET/PP tray recycling demonstration plant at the end of November 2025. Boretech has implemented its self-developed PET tray washing process to achieve a true tray-to-tray closed-loop recycling system. This facility recycles tray wastes to tray flakes, used in the production of recycled trays. It provides a new way for pallet manufacturers and brands to meet compliance requirements by no longer relying on borrowing bottle-grade recycled materials. A factory tour reservation and rTray sample reservations are now open.