HDPE Beverage Closures

Cap2Cap recycling Technological, Legal and Economic Analysis With Focus on EU Market

Abstract

As of today, caps are not recycled in a closed loop, because the European authority for food contact approvals (EFSA) did not give any positive opinion to any technology with the reasoning that not enough scientific data are available. With the most recent legal changes introducing the status of “novel technologies”, allowing recyclers to go for commercial production under specific conditions if proof of concept is given. However, the complexity is high starting with the large variation of colours that has been personally mapped within this study in supermarkets in different EU countries. Moreover, the challenge on chemical level in terms of decontamination and material properties is representing a crucial one. HDPE has a structure and physical properties, like the low melting point, that do not allow an efficient decontamination as it would be the case for PET, which is vastly recycled within the EU today. Nevertheless, the strong believe with a quite clean input material coming from a deposit return system can allow fulfilling food contact compliance and the beauty is that this input material is today already available after the sink-float separation of PET and HDPE in existing recycling installations. A big question mark we have still for the safety and performance of a cap that will be produced with a possible rHDPE grade. Based on assumptions how the material properties could change and how these would affect the cap performance, a matrix has been established expressing the complexity for this challenging application, proving that a case by case validation would be required to identify suitability of a rHDPE grade with a specific cap design. Economically, HDPE cap2cap recycling looks very promising even though the initial capex is high it pays off quite fast. We would assume that vertical integration in existing recycling facilities would be favoured due to lower investment and availability of existing input material, which is key in recycling. Considering the energy consumption for HDPE recycling a saving of around 86% savings CO2 was calculated. Based on the total volume going through today’s installed DRS would save emissions of 12.680 cars per year. In a utopian case, that DRS would be installed in all EU countries, a saving of emissions equivalent to 49.950 cars can be achieved. This would clearly contribute to a CO2 neutrality in future and making our planet greener.