Fully recyclable: FreshSafe technology from KHS targets juice producers

16 Nov 2018 --- The German Packaging Law will come into effect on January 1 and place stricter regulations on packaging, especially in regards to recycling and reuse. KHS is offering FreshSafe PET, which coats PET in glass, allowing the typically blended material juice and nectar bottles to be included in the pure PET cycle, to ease the costs that the law may bring to juice and nectar producers.

The FreshSafe technology gives an alternative to such producers, who typically fill their products into PET bottles. Non-returnable PET bottles are essentially fully recyclable; however, most of today’s juice and nectar bottles do not consist solely of PET. In many cases, they contain multilayer, blended or scavenger materials which protect the sensitive beverages from external influences such as oxygen pickup.

With FreshSafe, after the PET bottle has been manufactured, an ultra-thin glass coating is applied to its inside wall. These coated PET bottles are 100 percent recyclable as the coating is washed off during the recycling process, producing pure, fully segregated PET.

The FreshSafe technology gives an alternative to such producers, who typically fill their products into PET bottles. Non-returnable PET bottles are essentially fully recyclable; however, most of today’s juice and nectar bottles do not consist solely of PET. In many cases, they contain multilayer, blended or scavenger materials which protect the sensitive beverages from external influences such as oxygen pickup.

“Glass-coated PET bottles allow juice and nectar bottles to be included in the pure PET cycle and their materials to be recycled together with other used PET bottles for water and carbonated beverages, for instance. To this end, however, the deposit-assisted return system must be extended to include these specially optimized bottles,” says Benedikt Kauertz, head of Environmental Assessment of Packaging at the independent Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Heidelberg, Germany.

German Packaging Law
When the German Packaging Law comes into effect on January 1, 2019, the new legislation will set down binding rules to increase recycling quotas. The amendment will levy higher fees for packaging which is difficult to recycle. This includes non-returnable PET bottles with composite materials for juice and nectar, among other products. Juice and nectar producers are thus currently looking for solutions which will help them to avoid the ensuing increase in costs.

The new regulations also prescribe increased recycling quotas for all types of packaging – also for plastics. As of January, 58.5 percent of all plastic waste is to be recycled, i.e., the separate materials recovered and reused. From 2022 onwards this figure is to rise to 63 percent. At the moment the amount of plastic recycled in Germany totals around 36 percent.

In this context, the dual waste disposal systems responsible for the collection of recyclable materials, such as non-returnable juice and nectar PET bottles, will be obliged to increase their recycling quotas in the future significantly. The new law allows them to reduce costs for easily and effectively recyclable materials and to charge more for packaging which is difficult to reuse. In the future, the participation fees calculated on this basis will be determined by some ecological criteria. The better a type of packaging can be segregated and recycled, the lower the fees for beverage producers and retailers.

Non-returnable PET bottles for juice and nectar which are challenging to recycle not only face the threat of higher fees due to their unfavorable properties. In the long term, a complete ban on packaging such as the above could also even come into effect, KHS notes.

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