MATERIALS / RECYCLING PETplanet Insider Vol. 23 No. 05/22 www.petpla.net 12 A report shows how far PET, the most circular of all plastics, is from real circularity How circular is PET? Research produced for Zero Waste Europe by sustainability consultancy Eunomia shows that most PET plastic recovered from bottles in Europe does not make its way back into new PET bottles. Significant improvements in PET design, collection and recycling will be needed to improve circularity, the study says. The “How circular is PET?” report presents a picture of the state of circularity of this material in bottles in Europe – including how much material from bottles is collected for recycling; how much of it is actually recycled; and how much of recycled PET is put into new bottles. Current circularity The majority of PET is not currently managed in a circular model since leakage from the circular system is high, with material lost at all stages of the PET lifecycle. As it is technically and economically more challenging to deliver manufacturing quality requirements from rPET than virgin PET, and as this is especially the case for closed loop applications, rPET can ‘cascade’ from one product stream to another, usually from higher quality to lower. Once cascaded, it is unlikely to return up the cascade and, in some cases, rPET may exit the circular recycling system through the cascade. What are the root causes of this problem? Ineffective collection systems leading to high losses of post-consumer PET. Lack of availability of recyclers means some collected material cannot be reprocessed. Contaminants from collection and sorting. Product design and material quality, including coloured PET and multimaterial applications as well as foodgrade standards for rPET. rPET economics, i.e., the market rate of rPET compared to vPET, which is dependent on many drivers including the demand by end markets. PET bottle stream Of the entire PET family, bottle recycling has the most developed technology and infrastructure. Across Europe, collection schemes for PET bottles vary. Some countries are achieving high recycling rates with beverage deposit refund schemes (DRS), while other countries and regions are achieving lower recycling rates with separate collection schemes. The report shows that PET bottles have a recycling rate of around 50% (calculated using the weight of PET material at the stage after wash and flake vs the weight of PET bottles (including lids and labels) placed on the market). rPET used in bottle manufacturing has high overall quality criteria and must be derived from bottles. It is estimated that bottles placed on the market (POM) only comprise an average of 17% rPET, with the remaining rPET downcycled into other, lower grade manufacturing applications and therefore considered a loss from the circular bottle stream. While bottles make up the largest share of PET packaging, PET is used in other PET applications, such as in fibres, single-use tray manufacturing, films, and strapping. There is no standardised collection and sorting of non-bottle PET applications in Europe. The lack of appropriate sorting and recycling technologies as well as the design of these applications makes them currently difficult to recycle. Although some tray and film recycling does happen on a small scale, the amount is negligible in the greater scheme of the PET packaging manufacturing scope currently. Therefore, only bottle recycling has been considered in the current scenario. Trays use approximately one third (31%) of the total rPET generated from bottle recycling. In total, PET packaging uses 74% of rPET derived from bottles. While this means that the rPET generated by bottles finds use in new packaging products, the lack of large-scale recycling for anything other than bottles means that it is eventually lost as leakage from the circularity of PET packaging. Approximately 14% of the global polyester market is recycled polyester, the majority of which is produced from PET bottles. Clear/light blue bottle material is typically most desirable for textile production, as this produces fibre with reduced discolouration. Although fibres may have a recycled content (rPET from bottles), there are no known current market scale recycling processes for post-consumer fibres. Therefore, as is similarly seen in other non-bottle PET applications, the RECYCLING
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