The new name CIRREC emphasises the company’s focus on ‘CIRcular RECycling’. In contrast to down-cycling, circular recycling brings products back into their original application without loss in quality and food safety. Functional properties like food grade quality, colour, impact strengths etc. are preserved or fully recovered in the process.
“In a truly circular economy, food packaging becomes food packaging again. Bottles are recycled back into bottles, food trays become food trays again. Clear remains clear, and mixed colours are used for non-clear applications like in Evolve by Faerch,” Lars Gade Hansen, CEO of Faerch Group, sets out the ambition stating. “Each application cleans up for itself and provides its own feedstock. The textile industry does not steal from packaging and tray manufactures stop stealing from the bottlers,” he says. “This is what we call true circularity. And this is what we believe the future of rigid food packaging will be,” he continues.
The launch of the CIRREC brand marks the achievement of important milestones:
Firstly, already today, CIRREC processes industrial volumes, recycling the equivalent of 1.2 billion food trays annually. This roughly reflects the entire Dutch market of sorted rigid PET household food packaging or, alternatively, the total amount of sorted PET pots, tubs and trays in Scandinavia.
Secondly, CIRREC has started scaling its tray-to-tray recycling capabilities into additional countries in Europe with the next two tray wash lines already ordered, quadrupling the output capacity equal to more than 5 billion food trays annually by 2025.
Thirdly, in Europe, there is rapid development from the collectors and pre-sorters in making post-consumer PET pots, tubs and trays accessible for recycling, with gradually improving feedstock quality, allowing the yields to be comparable with bottle recycling. And finally, CIRREC operates within the most demanding application of primary food packaging, and food grade rPET made from pots, tubs and trays, that will become a new widely-available commodity, tray-rPET.
