PETpla.net Insider 03 / 2011

MATERIAL / RECYCLING 20 PET planet insider Vol. 12 No. 03/11 www.petpla.net Recycling is growing rapidly and industry standards are rising; the technology is available to meet regulatory and market demands. Recycling: maximising use The growing use of rPET is not just a response to demand from bottlers for more recycled content, it is becoming an important marketing tool – but, at the same time, preform producers need to make sure they achieve the need for high quality by controlling material flow. The requirements of brand owners on rPET are actually much stricter than food- contact certifications, so it is essential that adequate PET recycling technology is deployed. Starlinger recycling tech- nology supplies high-tech recycling lines for bottle-to-bottle recycling and high-viscosity applications. Variables influencing PET recycling PET bottle recycling is driven by a number of factors, such as food- contact issues, required quality and quantities of input and output. Other drivers can include the following:  Political pressure that encourages resource conservation;  education for waste avoidance;  installation of systems to avoid land-fill;  a promotion of the reuse of plastic waste. The most effective measure is the promotion of recycling through taxation or the threat of it. At the eco- nomic level, virgin resin price is the largest influence on recycling; rPET still needs to be cheaper, in order to be considered as replacement. The price for baled material and flakes is, there- fore, driven not only by supply and demand but also by virgin resin price. Important social fac- tors include wider accept- ance of rPET in food- contact packaging and employment opportunity for less educated workers in many countries.  Beyond recycling technology availability, recyclability has to be considered when design- ing new packaging.  A whole array of life- cycle analyses confirms the positive environmen- tal impact of mechanical recycling.  Export or import of PET packaging waste and collection and re-use rate are heavily regulated. Food- contact approval is part of legal regulation in many countries. A technology supplier wishing to have equipment recognised for food- contact operation has to go through stringent testing, in order to prove cleansing capability. The letter of non- objection from the FDA (United States Food and Drug Administration) is an essential requirement for any com- pany to be considered as a supplier of super-clean recycling processes. As well as a challenge test, smell and taste tests might be required, in addition to migration or shelf-life tests. Precise definition and specifica- tion of input material is essential, as is a quality management audit of the recycler, in addition to the technol- ogy itself. In the case of the EFSA (European Food Safety Authority), it is expected that the current, initial authorisation phase will probably last until 2014. Commission regulation 282/2008 covers EU-wide harmonisa- tion of regulations and standards but individual countries’ national law will at least partially apply until the end of the initial phase. A washing line, for example, has to adapt to the deteriorating quality of baled material unless one is prepared to pay a premium price. The pres- ence of labels and glue are a chal- lenge for separation, which is also the case with bottles made of PVC, PLA and other materials. Extrusion systems have to be flexible in order to handle bulk densities that are lower due to light weighting, and be able to change process parameters in response to additives in the packaging and other factors. The final applica- tion decides the required rPET quality. In order to satisfy consumers’ highest safety standards, many brand owners require more from their processes than simply being within detection limits. A requirement for ‘non-detect- able VOC (volatile organic content) level’ is an increasingly common demand. A number of national and international certifications, including several FDA non-objection letters and brand owner approvals, confirm that rPET produced using the Starlinger iV+ process is suitable for packag- ing with direct food contact. Graph 1 shows a comparison of headspace gas chromatography of Starlinger rPET, compared with virgin resin. Starlinger launched its first PET recycling line in 2003 and has gone on to establish itself as a technology- based supplier of recycling lines for bottle-to-bottle and high-viscosity applications, amongst others. The total world-wide installed capacity for the production of rPET pellets used in direct food contact packaging may have been doubled in 2010, reaching over 180,000t/a. Starlinger’s recoStar PET iV+ technology yields recycled PET with properties similar to those of Graph 1: Headspace gaschromatography: virgin PET vs rPET (measured by Fraunhofer-Institut für Verfah- renstechnik und Verpackung, Germany).