Greiner Packaging has secured approval from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to recycle post‐consumer PET into food contact materials.

The move covers Greiner’s site in Dungannon, Northern Ireland and major step for the company’s packaging development in the European market.

Greiner Packaging UK sales director Julie Eller said: “This is a significant and hugely important step in our journey to use increasing amounts of recycled material in our food-grade packaging, The EFSA panel has concluded that the recycling process we use is safe for the manufacturing of food-grade packaging.

“We have invested over £3,700,000 in our new PET decontamination and extrusion line to enable the use of more recycled materials in our market-leading packaging ranges. This is the latest step in our continued commitment to innovate, increase capacity and reduce our carbon footprint.”

Greiner Packaging sustainability and innovation manager Rachel Sheldon added: This EFSA approved recycling method allows Greiner Packaging to integrate the supply chain, and we are well on our way to being able to include at least 30% recycled content in all products. Rather than buying-in PET sheet and selling off any waste, we can now create recycled PET (rPET) sheet on-site, and re-use excess material.

“Until last year, we only extruded polypropylene (PP) in Dungannon, but now we can extrude rPET, and recycled polypropylene (rPP).

“Currently, most of the rPET supply available in the UK originates from plastic bottles, a very clean source. The new intergrated line enables ‘tray-to-tray’ recycling – meaning that we can process material from a wider variety of sources and utilise a lighter grade of recyclate. This novel process and equipment arrangement provides greater capability to control and enhance material characteristics to better meet our customer’s product specifications.

“While rPET has become commonplace for chilled products such as salads, PP has remained the main material for dairy products and our aim is to offer increasing r-PP content, even though food-grade PP recyclate is currently in short supply in the UK. Despite this, pilot quantities of r-PP for product trials are already available.

“While a lot of talk in the industry has recently only been about r-PET, we are already in a position to favour either rPET or rPP, and can produce the majority of our products using either material. Across Europe, we are already making products with rPP, and this is set to increase.”

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