It’s necessary to avoid losing material and reuse it as often as possible. In this way, plastics and our products are able to meet requirements on circular economy, emissions, CO2-footprint, etc. That’s why all European countries are currently optimizing their recycling processes to be able to increase the amount of recycled waste.
But it’s very important, that we design our packaging fit for these recycling processes, without this the best recycling process is not efficient enough.
What we did so far, is focusing on :
o removing Carbon black as masterbatch. Before the recycling starts, it’s necessary, that the different types of plastics are sorted into different streams. For the sorting, NIR (near infra-red) light is used. The problem with Carbon black masterbatches is, that it absorbs the NIR light, so it can’t be detected which polymer type the packaging is made from. If we adapt this, even black items will be recyclable.
o combining container and cap from the same material Roundpacker (HDPE) with Hingegard-neck, so a LDPE Hingegard-cap fits. It’s easily recyclable then in the PE stream without complex sorting steps.
o Identify all critical points of recycling in Pont’s markets, to be able to give an advice to our customer how to design their packaging fit for recycling.
In most of the European countries, only PET clear and light blue can be recycled. Coloured and opaque PET are not yet recycled, because there isn’t an existing market for applications of the recycled material.
HDPE has less specifications for recycling, because there might be more applications for recycled coloured HDPE. As far as the HDPE has a detectable colour (no Carbon black), the colour doesn’t influence the recyclability.
For detailed information on the requirements of recyclability, please contact us: info@ponteurope.com