The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) sets a lofty goal for recycled content in plastic food packaging. By 2030, contact-sensitive packaging (which includes food-contact applications) will need to contain 10% recycled plastic.
Since PPWR proposals from the European Commission became public in 2022, the mechanical recycling market has made slow progress towards this goal. Food contact applications throw up significant hurdles that other packaging applications do not; the feedstock to make the recyclate must have previously been used for food contact, safety requirements are more stringent.
Food packaging is also often made of transparent, flexible plastic, which is significantly more difficult to make safe and visually appealing via mechanical recycling routes. One proven way of producing food-safe recycled material is through chemical recycling, which involves breaking down end of life plastics into their constituent molecules and reforming them into a fresh polymer.
While the quality of material produced from this process is very good, high price points and a lack of clarity around exactly how chemical recycling may contribute towards hitting PPWR targets leaves packaging producers sorely in need of alternative, mechanical, recycling solutions to the contact sensitive predicament.
UK-based Nextek is one of the few companies to have made progress in this field, through its technologies Nextloopp and COtooClean. Having won the Alliance Prize for recycling flexible plastics in the US in 2022, a COtooClean PP film recycling plant was opened in the UK earlier this year.
Both technologies allow the decontamination and mechanical recycling of polypropylene; Nextloopp is focused on rigid plastics and works by thermal diffusion, whereas COtooClean uses super-critical CO2 as a solvent and works on flexibles.
Both technologies are currently on the European Commission’s novel technologies list (along with 26 others), where they will stay under rigorous operational monitoring until the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) deems them a suitable technology for food grade recycled material production.
“This is not an easy task ,” says Nextek CEO Ed Kosior. “Polyolefins are chemically permeable,” meaning they readily absorb the smell of the food they are initially used to package. Also, “[PP] appears in the marketplace typically not as a bottle,” says Kosior. “Most of the recycling in the world has focused on bottles.” PP often comes in the form of tubs and trays, which require extra consideration when sorting, or film, which requires a totally different recycling process.
High density polyethylene (HDPE), meanwhile, is used to produce bottles, but is very often used to package non-food items like detergents, which cannot be used as a feedstock for food-grade rHDPE in the EU. This means rigorous feedstock sorting is required.
“Technically effective, but also commercially effective”
Like most nascent industries, mechanical recycling of food-grade polyolefins often sees high, and sometimes unfeasible, price points. Kosior hopes Nextek’s technologies and others like it will change this.
“It’s completely scalable,” he says, adding that the modular set-up of Nextloopp allows units to be installed that each process up to 2 tonnes of feedstock per hour. “The thing that's limiting this at the moment is just the marketplace. As the market grows, the machinery companies will actually be encouraged to develop bigger machines.”
A game-changer has been the use of AI in feedstock sorting, where new technologies are trained to separate food from non-food packaging. Kosior says previous attempts to use fluorescent markers to distinguish between the two fell flat due to costs, but that AI can now provide the same results more cheaply.
“We went into the artificial intelligence sorting of PP packaging, and we found that we could do that just as effectively, and we could reach all of our... food content targets very easily, and this made the whole process commercially viable,” says Kosior.
The extra steps mean the cost of producing a food-grade rPP pellet in this way is around 25% greater than producing a typically non-food grade rPP packaging grade pellet, says Kosior. Prices for the pellets, however, can be much higher, due market demands for feedstock purity, traceability and post-production testing.
“So for recyclers, they can actually get a much better investment return making food grade materials than making the conventional... non-food materials,” says Kosior.
Kosior thinks this will become even more intense in the run up to 2030 PPWR deadlines. “Companies will do what they very often do. They'll leave things to the last minute and then there'll be a big scramble. And so the companies that are making food grade PP will have a very high demand and then there'll be a rush in investment into PP food grade recycling facilities.”
“ICIS estimates the EU would require 0.4 million tonnes of recycled polyolefins to meet contact-sensitive PPWR recycled content targets in 2030,” says ICIS recycling analyst Mia McLachlan.
“Demand for recyclate into these applications is expected to be largely met by chemical recycling as the availability of compliant mechanically recycled material, particularly food-grade, remains limited.”
“I liken this to PET recycling,” says Kosior. “If you roll the clock back 30 years, there was only one PET recycling process approved by US FDA... Now there are quite a few different ways of making food grade recycled PET. I think [polyolefins] will be the same.”