PETpla.net Insider 04 / 2012

MATERIAL / RECYCLING 12 PET planet insider Vol. 13 No. 04/12 www.petpla.net Comparing PET bottle-to-bottle recycle testing protocols: US and Europe What happens down the recycling stream? by Julianne Brown, Recycling & Material Evaluation Specialist, Plastic Technologies, Inc. Brand owners are continuing to push performance bounda- ries by working with new resins, additives and multilayer structures to achieve longer shelf life and other attributes. The downside is that very little is known about what hap- pens to the recycling stream when many of these innovative materials enter it. For example, will products containing bar- rier or high-recycle content worsen the current stream? Do additives play a big part in impacting the recycle stream? To obtain answers to some of these questions, suppliers and brand owners are turning to experienced organisations to better understand the impact of PET bottle and thermoform recycling on the next generation of bottle quality. The Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers (APR) in the United States and the European PET Bottle Platform (EPBP) in Europe promote recycling. Each has established testing protocols for resins, multilayer structures, coatings, additives, adhesives and labels used in PET applications. Why is there a need for two separate testing protocols? While there are a vast number of PET resin grades in the United States, they are not necessarily the most widely used in Europe and vice versa. For example, the European protocol does not allow the use of resins con- taining “heat-up” additives to be used as test controls. Conversely, since heat-up resins are widely used in the United States they are the preferred control resin for carbonated soft drink testing protocols there. Unfortunately, there is currently no common base resin that can be used for both of these protocols. Therefore, these differences can make it difficult if not impossible to perform one study The primary steps of the US and European recycle protocols