With manufacturers of dairy as well as home and personal care products seen to be switching from HDPE to PET packaging, the industry association Plastics Recyclers Europe (PRE, Brussels / Belgium; www.plasticsrecyclers.eu) has expressed concern about the impact on PET recycling. The shift in the material balance, it says, could add more than 300,000 t/y of coloured PET, including black and white, to recycling streams – a burden the world’s largest plastics recyclate market “cannot afford to absorb.”

The “colourful” trend will weaken the image of PET as a recycled product, PRE believes, and also will “create great difficulties for the PET recycling industry, which already has other market barriers to overcome.” If containers of various colours are collected together, additional sorting at the recycling plant will be required, it says, identifying one of the perceived problems. Packaging products emerging from the colour mix “would be tinted black or grey, but no market currently exists for such a material in large quantities."

“Even worse,” the association continues, if white PET milk bottles contain TiO₂, the recyclers’ end-product will be “highly contaminated,” explaining that the presence of the white pigment can reduce the transparency of clear recycled PET and create a haze affect. As coloured PET packaging can contain as much as 5% TiO₂, this could create “serious issues for food contact and fibre applications.” In both cases, PRE suspects the new products “will lead to a fall in the use of recycled PET.”

From the recyclers’ perspective, this “colourful” future trend will weaken the image of PET as a recycled product. Furthermore, it says, the existing HDPE recycling industry, which already has a market for coloured recyclate in applications such as pipe, will suffer if coloured PET applications continue to grow.

Painting the projected implications of the material shift in even more dramatic terms, PRE says “the actors willing to pursue this dangerous path” should be prepared to bear the higher costs “and accept a collapse in both the PET and HDPE recycling industries.” Offering a smidgen of hope amid the gloom, the association proposes as an alternative the use of full body sleeves, which it says “would ensure a colourful effect.” At the same time, it warns that “the sleeves must be detectable by NIR sorting systems and cannot interact negatively in the recycling process.”