FRA-PET

Used in plastic food trays, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is the most recycled plastic packaging material in Europe. But almost 50 % is landfilled or incinerated. The problem is that PET is commonly combined with other chemicals, like ethylene-vinyl alcohol copolymer (EVOH), to create multilayer PET/EVOH plastic sheets. The good news is that these offer an efficient barrier to oxygen penetration. The bad news is that the EVOH layer renders plastic food trays unrecyclable. Since PET/EVOH trays cannot be sorted from fully recyclable PET trays (those not containing EVOH), all food trays are discarded rather than recycled. The EU-funded FRA-PET project is developing an additive proprietary chemical formulation to produce a fully recyclable PET barrier package for food preservation, without EVOH. With this new chemical formulation, recycling of these items can be increased to 100 %.