Belgium-based trade body Plastics Recyclers Europe has called for a joint initiative to establish a separate recycling stream for thermoformed PET trays.
According to Plastics Recyclers Europe, PET trays are valuable recyclable products and future investments will permit better recycling of trays.
For efficient recycling, the trade body requested not to mix PET bottles and trays.
PET trays need to be sorted separately from the PET bottle streams and recycled separately in order to ensure resource efficiency.
Plastics Recyclers Europe PET chairman Casper van den Dungen said the designs and chemical compositions of trays and bottles are not similar and can create quality problems for existing PET recyclers.
"The collection schemes and sorting centres cannot push this issue down the value chain" Dungen added.
If separated from other streams such as PET bottles or polyolefins properly, the 700,000t of PET trays yearly consumed in Europe can be recycled as valuable material.
