Day 2 - Circularity and Innovation - driving the PET industry
The second day of the conference started with the morning session focusing on "PET in the circular economy - a global perspective".
A significant highlight of the conference was the presentation by Rana Pant from the European Commission. Rana, Policy Officer at DG ENV focusing on the SUP Directive, gave a detailed overview of the SUP Directive and Essential Requirements in the PPWD. He insisted on an evaluation and follow-up of the new regulations by the European Commission as well as most likely an elaboration of a positive & negative recycling list.
Christian Crépet, Executive Director of Petcore Europe, thanked Rana for the clarifying presentation and stressed the importance of collaboration between the industry and policy makers.
John V. Standish, from APR (The Association of Plastic Recyclers - North America) continued the session with a presentation on package design guidance for PET in the United States and on how new requirements can support a gobal circular economy.
Last but not least, Professor Kim Ragaert from University of Ghent presented what is needed to make PET pots, tubs and trays roll down the bottles road into circular economy. Kim concluded her presentation by stating that Bottle PET made it to the posterchild of plastics recycling due to industry collaboration. PET trays have the same potential, with a few neat tricks provided by science it can follow the bottles into circular economy.
Trends and Solutions in PET Collection and Recycling
In the afternoon session of day two, the focus shifted to trends and solutions in the PET post-consumer collection and recycling.
First, Wolfgang Ringel from Tomra gave an overview of the current state of Deposit Return Systems and it's potential to grow. He was followed by Vincent Colard from Citeo, who presented about the collection and sorting of ODR and PET trays in France and Citeo's efforts to find circular solutions. Afterwards Gian de Belder from Procter & Gamble and Larry Logan from Digimarc presented the Holy Grail project on digital watermarks. Gian announced that several P&G brands will integrate digital watermarks with first shipments end of the year in Germany. To end this session, Nicolas Grotus from Pellenc ST gave an insightfull presentation on Artificial Intellegence and its place in solving food and non-food as well as other sorting challenges.
The third session of the day focused on trends in PET trays recycling. Ana Fernandez, from Klöckner Pentaplast highlighted that "recycling PET thermoforms is the final step in closing the already successfull PET recycling loop". Ana present several projects that are working towards tray circularity. Afterwards, Mark Dawes from Dupont Teijin Films presented Mono-Material PET Lidding Films and concluded that PET is a unique polymer that enables mono-material tray and lid solutions with high percentages of recycled content in direct food contact applications.
Trends in Chemical or Back-to-Monomer Recycling
The last session of this year's Petcore Europe Conference focused on Monomer/Enhanced recycling which was generally seen as one of the most important long-term solutions to make PET even more circular.
Heike Fischer, from PETplanet introduced and moderated the session in which Leela Dilkes-Hoffman from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Wim Hoenderdaal from Indorama Ventures Europe and Bruno Van Gompel from Coca-Cola presented their views on PET monomer recycling. Wim, Chairman of the PET Monomer Recycling Special Industry Group had the pleasure to announce the first PET Monomer Recycling Forum on 16 April 2020 in Brussels. Details can be found on petmonomerrecycling.org.
Petcore Europe Conference 2021
The next Petcore Europe Conference will take place in the first quarter of 2021. The exact date and place will be announced in the second half of 2020.
To order the conference papers for non-participants, to be kept informed about our future events, or to receive information regarding membership, please contact us via management@petcore-europe.org.
