Argus has launched price assessments for the PET tray-to-tray recycling sector, in response to growing demand for transparency to support the developing market. This blog outlines Argus’ plans and answers some common questions about the tray recycling market.
What are the challenges of tray-to-tray recycling?
Recycling PET trays presents a number of different challenges to those in the well-established PET bottle recycling sector.
Collection rates for tray packaging — in the absence of deposit return schemes — are much lower than for bottles in Europe and there is a lack of standardisation in collection and sorting across Europe. Currently, PET trays are mostly collected with the co-mingled recyclables and separated at sorting centres. Because of tray bales’ higher contaminant levels, and because trays tend to have a greater variety of packaging types — ranging from mono/multi materials to differing colours, lids and labels — more extensive washing and processing is necessary. Combined with greater generation of fines during the recycling process — because of trays’ brittleness — yields from tray bales are much lower than from bottle bales, particularly without specialised recycling equipment.
Plastics Recyclers Europe estimates that almost 60pc of trays placed on the market are multilayer, with more mono-layer trays in northern Europe and more multi-layer usage in southern Europe. But many material recovery facilities are yet to update sorting technologies to sort between mono and multilayer trays because of the installation costs. More investment in infrastructure is needed to grow the tray recycling market.
Why is tray-to-tray recycling important?
The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) sets recycled content targets of 30pc for contact-sensitive PET packaging and 35pc for non-contact sensitive packaging by 2030, rising to 50pc and 65pc, respectively, by 2040. And with recycled content requirements already in place for PET beverage bottles (and set to increase in 2030 and 2040), availability of rPET is likely to be limited.
|
PPWR recycled content requirements |
||
|
Packaging type |
2030 |
2040 |
|
Single-use plastic beverage bottles |
30% |
65% |
|
PET contact-sensitive packaging |
30% |
50% |
|
Non-PET contact-sensitive packaging |
10% |
50% |
|
Other packaging |
35% |
65% |
This gives the industry an incentive to close the loop and ensure a solid supply of recycled PET from trays which — owing to its lower intrinsic viscosity, making it less suitable for bottle production — will not bring tray manufacturers into direct competition for material with the beverage bottle industry. But the industry will need to grow. Current estimates from the recent PET Thermoforms conference in Dijon were that only around 30pc of the 1mn t or so of PET trays placed on the EU market are collected for recycling. This, combined with an average recycling yield of 50pc, suggests that tray-to-tray recycling is only enough to reach 15pc recycled content in a closed-loop system.
What solutions are emerging?
Several mechanical recyclers are investing in new and improved technologies for better tray-to-tray recycling. Chemical recycling is also seen as a potential solution for difficult-to-recycle trays.
For the recycling of coloured, multilayer and more contaminated trays, chemical recycling could advance the market significantly in the coming years. Through the process of depolymerisation (also known as solvolysis), PET trays can be broken down into molecular building blocks called monomers. Depolymerisation includes methanolysis, glycolysis and hydrolysis technologies that each use particular catalysts to produce monomers. These monomers can then be used at different steps in the production of repolymerised PET.
A small number of depolymerisation projects in Europe are in the pipeline for the coming years. But many are at limited capacity and would need to scale up to industrial operations, and they also face challenges from a difficult economic environment.
While chemical recycling is a solution for more contaminated or hard-to-recycle waste, the quality of the input waste still determines yield and quality of output. Therefore, chemical recyclers also still need to consider better collection and sorting activity if they are to maximise output.
How can independent pricing help?
Market participants’ feedback to Argus indicated that tray-to-tray pricing was needed to bring more transparency to the market, particularly given the need for investment ahead of upcoming legislative changes. Currently, it is common for tray bale and flake pricing to be linked to bottle bale pricing, but many market participants see a need for dedicated tray pricing, to represent the tray market’s particular challenges and supply-demand dynamics as it continues to evolve and grow.
Liquidity in the tray market has increased in recent months and years, with a growing number of modern sorting lines now equipped to supply sorted tray bales to recyclers getting involved in the market. As such, we now believe that this is the right time to provide price information specific to the market, to help participants with short and long-term strategy decisions.
What will Argus offer?
Argus currently offers excellent in-depth coverage of PET and rPET markets — globally and in Europe. For rPET, we cover food-grade pellets, bottle flake and bottle bales in all regions of Europe and elsewhere. We are launching new price assessments to extend this coverage to the PET tray recycling market in Europe. In the first instance, prices will be for clear post-consumer monolayer and multilayer tray bales, and clear hot-washed tray flakes, in €/t on a delivered western Europe basis. Prices for both series will appear in the Argus Recycled Polymers report in the last publication of each month. Further information will be available in the Argus Recycled Polymers Methodology, which is available via Argus’ website.
