We need industry collaboration to ensure better collection of food packaging

Do you know what happens to a food tray after use? Is it considered waste or a valuable resource? Thanks to its great recycling properties, PET is considered a high-value material. However, PET products are too often discarded without capturing the benefits of circular recycling. We need to tackle this urgent challenge.

To make sure that PET is treated as a valuable resource and kept in the loop, we need to strengthen collection and sorting infrastructures. This requires great collaboration from all key players in the plastics value chain, from producers to recyclers. From legislators to consumers. Today, recycling is held back by insufficient volume and poor collection and sorting quality. Faerch will continue to invest in and expand the recycling infrastructure for PET food packaging.

Food trays designed for recyclability

To expand the lifespan of a tray from 8 days to an endless number of cycles, we need to make sure that our products are fully available for recycling. Better product design will make recycling our food trays easier and continue to be a key factor in the creation of a true circular economy for food packaging.

Turning challenges into opportunities: Our circularity concepts for food trays

Sorting infrastructure across Europe is improving, but certain shortcomings still need to be mitigated. Each bale of post-consumer recycled PET is important to us, so we offer special customer programmes to make sure that PET is kept in the cycle – and recycled again and again. This will benefit the environment – and your business.

Our Tonne for Tonne Programme is designed to ensure circularity by keeping PET in the economy. We invite large customers to join in! For each tonne of PET packaging you buy from us, we commit to purchase the exact same amount of post-consumer PET locally, and to recycle it back into new food packaging again.

With our Buy-Back Programme, we partner with catering service customers to create a truly closed loop for food trays. You buy our trays and, after use, the trays are sold back to us and processed into “new” post-consumer recycled food trays of the same quality.

Both concepts are designed to keep a valuable circular material in the economy, to create true circularity, and to have a real impact on the environment and climate.

We have taken the lead in setting ambitious targets

As the world’s only integrated food tray recycler, we are capable of offering tray-to-tray recycling on an industrial scale. However, we need to go further. We need the entire packaging industry to transition to the right material choice, working for a better system and true circularity. Therefore, at Faerch, we support bold joint commitments of our industry. We joined the UK Plastics Pact and the European Plastics Pact to bring about systemic change and to build a system that keeps plastic in the economy and out of the environment.