PACKAGING | OPINION
Why the polyolefin fraction has been harder to capture PET’s mechanical recycling infrastructure had a head start. Bottle-to-bottle rPET is a mainstream compliance route, helped by a waste stream dominated by a single format – the beverage bottle – collected through deposit and kerbside systems with comparatively low contamination. Rigid PP is harder to sort. Food trays, pots, tubs,
The JRC report Economic viability of chemical recycling – Current and future perspectives, written by P Gaudillat, R Marschinski and H Saveyn can be downloaded at the European Commission’s website
mechanically recycled PET. None of this is a case for shutting chemical
recycling out of the picture. The JRC is explicit that it expects the technology to keep playing a role in meeting recycled-content obligations in the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), particularly for the mixed and contaminated fractions mechanical recycling cannot economically process. What the report does is remove the ambiguity about where the cost advantage sits today: with mechanical recycling, wherever a recycler is technically equipped to do the job. That “wherever” is the key word and it’s where this becomes a question about recyclers’ own equipment and processes rather than an abstract policy comparison.
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closures and personal care packaging arrive mixed, in a wide range of colours and resin grades. Pulling food-grade candidates out of that stream and proving the resulting material is free of substances that concern regulators, has historically been a tougher separation problem than anything PET presented – and it’s a problem that sits squarely in the recycler’s own plant, not somewhere further up or down the supply chain. That’s also the gap the JRC’s cost comparison doesn’t capture. Its economics assume the feed- stock is already sorted into usable polymer streams. For PP and PE, getting to that starting point – not the reprocessing itself – has been the industry’s real constraint, and it’s a constraint that sorting and decontamination technology is now addressing directly.
The equipment case: what’s changed on the plant floor This is the part of the narrative a cost-per-tonne report isn’t designed to tell, but it’s the part that matters most for a recycler weighing upgrade capex. AI-based NIR sorting now separates PP packaging by polymer type, colour and likely prior use with a precision that wasn’t commercially available even five years ago. Paired with more intensive washing and decontamination stages – designed to remove absorbed contaminants rather than simply melt and re-pelletise whatever comes in – and rigorous chemical validation against food-contact migration limits, these process upgrades have already produced recycled PP with EFSA novel-technology registration and USFDA Letters of No Objection covering food-contact applications A through H. Recycled polyolefin films – long written off as
unrecyclable to food-contact standard because of multilayer structures and grease or food-residue contamination – are moving through the same pilot-to-early-commercial trajectory. For a recycler, this changes the calculation on
existing capacity. Much of Europe’s mechanical recycling capacity is currently underutilised, and it can be upgraded with modern sorting and decon- tamination modules faster and at markedly lower
September 2026 | PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD 11
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