PETpla.net Insider 06 / 2013

MATERIAL / RECYCLING 19 PET planet insider Vol. 14 No. 06/13 www.petpla.net Step 2:  The contaminated flakes (washed or unwashed) are processed at a rate of 100 % without dilution (i.e. adding non-contaminated flakes) – no mixing of flakes or homogeni- sation,  In order to prove FIFO (first-in, first-out) processing, contaminated flakes have a different colour, in this case green.  To be able to run a small challenge test batch (about 80 – 100kg) the pilot plant also has to process a certain amount of clean flakes to allow stable production. Those flakes are transparent so that at Challenge test results unwashed flakes, washed flakes in comparison with the EFSA threshold The EFSA evaluation procedure According to a the Commission Regulation (EC) No 282/20084 of 27 March 2008 on recycled plastic materi- als intended to come into contact with foods and amending Regulation (EC) No 2023/20065, the EFSA is requested to evaluate recycling processes of plastic waste. EFSA evaluations only concern the safety of mechanical recycling processes in which used consumer plastics are collected, ground into small flakes and decontaminated before being processed into new materials for use in the food packaging chain. Collected plastics used in mechanical recycling could be contaminated with chemicals that are not suitable for food contact applications. Consequently, recyclers are required to demonstrate that their process can reduce chemical contaminants in the recycled plastic to such a level that potential migration of any residual chemicals does not pose a risk for human health. Detailed specifications for the input materi- als are provided for each of the submitted recycling processes; the amount of PET from non-food consumer applica- tions should be below 5% for all of them. www.efsa.europa.eu the end the pellets produced from contaminated flakes (green) can be distinguished from those produced from clean flakes (transparent).  No dilution: only pellets produced from contaminated flakes (green) are used for analysing the quantity of residual surrogates or calculat- ing the cleaning efficiency. Step 3:  Analysis of super cleaned rPET pellets.  Relevant are results regarding residual surrogates (ppm) and decontamination efficiency (%) relative to input contamination. In both scenarios the recoStar PET iV+ process reached the required EFSA cleaning efficiency according to the defined criteria (Criteria for safety evaluation of PET recycling pro- cesses, published 2011:  Contamination concentration in the PET flakes are modelled corre- sponding to a migration after 365 days storage at 25°C.  Not exceeding dietary exposure of 0.025μg/kg body weight/day  The most conservative default sce- nario for infants is used for model- ling (migration of 0.1μg/kg) www.recycling.starlinger.com Molecular weight Required cleaning efficiency EFSA Cleaning efficiency recoStar PET iV+ Cleaning efficiency recoStar PET iV+: (g/mol) 100% unwashed flakes 100% washed flakes Toluene 92.1 >97.34 % >99.9 % >99.9 % Chloroform 119.4 >96.67 % >99.9 % >99.9 % Phenyl Cyclohexane 160.3 >95.57 % >99.9 % >99.9 % Benzophenone 182.2 >94.87 % >98.5 % >99.8 % Lindane 290.8 >89.67 % >90.9 % >99.9 %