PETpla.net Insider 06 / 2021

TRADE SHOW REVIEW PETplanet Insider Vol. 22 No. 06/21 www.petpla.net 42 Casper van den Dungen, Vice President of Plastics Recyclers Europe , pointed out that 5.3MT PET is placed on the market. 66% is used for PET beverage bottles, 5% for non-beverage bottles, 19% for trays, 6% for flexible packaging and 4% for others. In conclusion, 96% of PET is used in packaging (bottles, trays and flexible). He saw a trend in bottle pro- duction that will continue to increase at a slower pace, with tray consump- tion likely to grow. In PET sorting and collection, Casper saw an impact of minus 10-15% during the pandemic. For PET recycling, Casper highlighted the importance of DRS systems, where the growth of collection is the major driving force. He presented four key market developments for rPET in 2025: the first limitation remains col- lection, and he suggested a deposit increase is needed in the major countries. The second limitation is the quality of collection, the third is the harmonisation of direct food contact for recyclates (regulation 282/2008), and finally the fourth limitation is a lack of transparency towards devel- opments on modulation of costs for collection & recycling. That is why Casper urged major changes to raise awareness of design for recycling, to increase bottle collection and to use the maximum value of collected PET to program new business models to finance the higher targets. Frédéric Durand from Tomra talked about Trends in Sorting – Roadmap for Digital Watermarks and Artificial Intelligence. As a member of the Holy Grail project, he called for today’s limits in sorting to be over- come. He said that this could be achieved by improving the detection and sorting of materials, especially of difficult to sort / recycle, by enabling food and non-food recycling applica- tions among others and finally by a proof-of concept successful within the Holy Grail project. Frédéric’s ambitions for the Holy Grail 2.0 are to enable and develop a true circu- lar economy, to identify and evaluate potential test markets and sites with project partners at the large installed base of Tomra equipment in different applications and markets (clean/dirty MRF, PRF etc.). He added that Tomra aims to establish a dedicated, ring-fenced DW project team (two additional staff planned) to build, install and sup- port test machines for industrial trials, once funding is secured. Tomra will continue add-on module development (connected to standard NIR) based on the new defined specification. Finally with the good, established working relationship with the Digimarc R&D team, Tomra supports business devel- opment activities and shares market knowledge in HG 2.0. There will be a second part of the review on “Trends in Design for Recy- cling”, “Monomer Recycling - where is circular PET headed?” and “Circularity of PET - opportunities beyond recy- cling”. Information about the speakers and their presentations can be found on the event homepage at Petcore. November 7-9, 2021, Dubai At the KRONES booth A1-34 German Technology Innovative hotrunner optiRun www.petcoreeuropeannual-conference.eu www.petcore-europe.org