Plans on the table for food-grade PET recycling plant

8 February 2007 – Britain could have its first food-grade PET recycling plant by the end of the year, according to a senior member of WRAP, the Waste and Resources Action Programme.

“We remain optimistic that at least one food-grade plant will be established by the end of the year,” WRAP’s Plastics Technology Manager, Paul Davidson, told PRW.

“WRAP hopes to make an announcement in the near future,” said Davidson.

The latest figures from WRAP reveal 100,000 tonnes of mixed plastics bottles were collected last year in the UK; roughly 45,000 tonnes were PET.

WRAP estimates demand for food-grade recycled PET (rPET) to be around 60,000 tonnes. With no plastics reprocessing plants producing food-grade rPET, the UK currently imports between 12,000 and 13,000 tonnes of the material each year, mainly from Europe.

Davidson is confident a greater use of rPET is something that customers want to see. “The other thing we know [from WRAP research] is that when packaging is made from recycled plastics, people are more likely to recycle it,” he told PRW.

Speaking at WRAP’s one-day conference The Opportunity for rPET in Retail Packaging, Davidson presented the findings of the organisation’s latest research. Davidson said there was no scenario of landfill that was better than recycling plastic bottles. He said some scenarios did favour incineration – this was for bottles that contained fatty or greasy substances and would therefore require intense washing. Davidson also took the opportunity to announce WRAP’s forthcoming TV campaign, believed to be the first one dedicated to plastics recycling.

Scheduled for screening in May/June, the adverts will centre on the strapline “Give your plastic bottle the chance to be something else”.

The media campaign will be part of WRAP’s Target Ten – an initiative aimed at boosting the amount of plastic bottles collected by local authorities from UK households. Current levels of bottle collection are on average 5kg per household per year. WRAP want to increase this to 10kg/hh/yr.