imprint EDITORIAL PUBLISHER Alexander Büchler, Managing Director HEAD OFFICE heidelberg business media GmbH Hubweg 15 74939 Zuzenhausen, Germany phone: +49 6221-65108-0 [email protected] EDITORIAL Kay Barton Heike Fischer Gabriele Kosmehl Michael Maruschke Ruari McCallion Anthony Withers Editorial & WikiPETia. info [email protected] MEDIA CONSULTANTS Martina Hirschmann [email protected] Johann Lange-Brock [email protected] phone: +49 6221-65108-0 LAYOUT AND PREPRESS EXPRIM Werbeagentur Matthias Gaumann www.exprim.de READER SERVICES [email protected] PRINT Chroma Druck Eine Unternehmung der Limberg-Druck GmbH Danziger Platz 6 67059 Ludwigshafen, Germany WWW www.hbmedia.net | www.petpla.net PETplanet Insider ISSN 1438-9459 is published 10 times a year. This publication is sent to qualified subscribers (1-year subscription 149 EUR, 2-year subscription 289 EUR, Young professionals’ subscription 99 EUR. Magazines will be dispatched to you by airmail). Not to be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. Note: The fact that product names may not be identified as trademarks is not an indication that such names are not registered trademarks. 3 PETplanet Insider Vol. 26 No. 01+02/25 www.petpla.net We have been able to admire PET closures for quite some time now. Last year, Origin Materials from West Sacramento, USA, presented two manufacturers. For North America, the Reed City Group, known for general plastic products, and for Europe, the Bachmann Group from Hochdorf, Switzerland - known for sustainable packaging. In plant engineering, this latter company cooperates with PackSys Global, also from Switzerland. The company plans to produce 1881 caps, including tethered caps, from PET and recycled PET (see article on p. 26). On page 22 there is also a report from Husky on their PET cap development. The solution is being hailed as a breakthrough in recycling circularity: bottle and cap made from one material. However, the usual polyolefin closures can be easily separated from the PET fractions in a water bath and consequently, there was never really a need for PET closure material here. On the contrary: as a closure is always a design element of the bottle, it is available in a wide variety of colours. A clean separation of cap and bottle is essential, as PET is easiest to recycle back into bottles when it is colourless. The new PET closures do not yet have an answer to this problem. They are transparent so that they do not colour the PET fraction during recycling. It remains to be seen whether bottlers will accept colourless closures. But the challenges of bottle-to-bottle recycling - which should really be called cap-and-bottle-to-cap-and-bottle recycling - start earlier. As the cap cannot simply be sorted out of the PET stream, the idea is to recycle it together with the bottle. The recycling of the closures is said to work on a laboratory scale, but we have not yet heard of a large-scale trial in a PET recycling plant, despite our enquiries. The recycling industry is asking itself whether the intrinsic viscosity (IV) of the closure material matches the IV of the bottles and whether a homogeneous rPET material is subsequently produced. It is also unclear how the PET cap manufacturers intend to avoid cold welding of the cap and bottle neck. Consumers may have difficulty removing the PET cap from the PET neck. It can be assumed that coatings or additives ensure a clean separation of neck and closure. But what influence do these additives have on rPET in cap-and-bottle-to-cap-andbottle recycling? Practice will certainly find answers to all these questions. For our part, we are looking forward to the first mass produced PET closures. Yours, Alexander Büchler Dear readers,
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