Revolutionizing tray recycling: Closing the loop in PET thermoform recycling with Starlinger viscotec technology.

All around the globe, we observe a strong food packaging trend towards increased post-consumer recycled (PCR) content. Brand owners commit to increasing post-consumer recycled content in water and carbonated soft drink segments. These developments have driven demand and prices up for clear post-consumer recycled PET bottle flakes. Starlinger viscotec’s solution to tackle this challenge is to prepare PET tray flakes for the recycling loop!

Post-consumer PET thermoform is good and usable material, and suitable for upcycling. However, it has lower intrinsic viscosity (IV) and it is amorphous – therefore, the material needs pre-treatment first. In terms of processable input material, viscotec’s production lines are highly flexible: post-consumer PET flakes, in-house skeleton waste and pellets can be used.

Our solution is designed to enable true Tray-to-Tray recycling with the deCON iV+:  crystallization, super cleaning decontamination and iv increase all in one compact unit.