On January 31, the Plastic Sense Foundation has joined the Circular Plastics Alliance (CPA), an initiative of the European Commission to increase the volume of recycled plastic in the European market. The Foundation joins the 188 entities that have already signed the Alliance statement.
This initiative was launched by the Commission on December 2018 and it aims to increase the amount of recycled plastic within the Euroepan market to 10 million tonnes in 2025, compared to 3.8 million tonnes registered in 2016.
The Plastic Sense Foundation is fully aligned with this objective. Its main task is to promote the use and recycling of the thermoformed PET tray in Europe, guaranteeing, through the ECOSENSE certification, the transparency and traceability of the incorporation of transparent PET flake from recycling processes of monolayer and/or multilayer post-waste from of industrial and post-consumer sources in the manufacture of new trays.
The final purpose is to guarantee the upcycling of the PET tray, maximizing the circularity of the packaging. For this, the Foundation has also published the Recyclability Guidelines for thermoformed PET trays, developed in the framework of the RETRAY project. RETRAY is a new voluntary certification program for food packers with the double objective of verifying the amount of recycled material incorporated in the packaging and its recyclability.
The Foundation has pledged to take part in the CPA’s Packaging Working Group to help achieve the established objectives, through the following lines of action: (1) the review and update of its Recyclability Guidelines, (2) the definition of Technical Specifications to improve sorting and quality of the PET tray at the facilities of PET bottle recyclers, (3) the boost and maintenance of the ECOSENSE certification and the RETRAY certification for the promotion of the use of recycled plastic within the PET thermoformed tray sector.