Recycled PET

Recycled PET for the European market

Recycled PET is the one material line where the EU has written the demand into law: from 2030, plastic packaging placed on the market has to contain minimum shares of post-consumer recycled content. We supply rPET alongside our packaging business — the same documentation discipline, applied one step upstream.

Grades we supply

• Hot-washed flake — post-consumer bottle flake, washed and dried, for converters who pelletise or extrude in-house.
• Bottle-grade pellet — for preform production feeding bottle blowing lines; specified against the intrinsic viscosity (IV) your preform process is set up for.
• Sheet and thermoforming grades — for trays, sheet extrusion and packaging producers.
• Fibre and strapping grades — where colour and IV tolerances are wider than bottle-to-bottle applications.
• Colour sorting — clear, light blue and mixed colour streams, quoted separately rather than blended into one specification.

Why the demand is structural, not cyclical

Article 7 of the PPWR (Regulation (EU) 2025/40) sets minimum recycled content for plastic packaging from 1 January 2030: 30 % for contact-sensitive PET packaging, 10 % for contact-sensitive packaging in other plastics, 30 % for single-use plastic beverage bottles and 35 % for other plastic packaging, rising again in 2040. For beverage bottles the recycled-content rules of the Single-Use Plastics Directive already apply today.

The targets count post-consumer material only (Article 3(1)(48)) — production scrap from a manufacturer's own plant does not qualify — and compliance is demonstrated through the technical documentation that sits behind the Declaration of Conformity. That is why converters and brands are locking in post-consumer supply now rather than in 2029.

Two routes into the EU, and the difference matters

• Food-contact applications — recycled plastic for food contact falls under Regulation (EU) 2022/1616, which applies to non-EU products exported to the EU as well. The recycling installation must be listed in the EU register of authorised operators before the material can be used for food contact.
• Non-food applications — sheet, fibre, strapping, industrial and some packaging applications that do not touch food are not governed by 2022/1616, and can open the door while authorisation for a food-contact stream is arranged.

What we confirm in writing before you commit

• The plant supplying the lot, with its grade list and monthly capacity.
• Whether the recycling installation is listed in the EU register for food-contact applications — stated plainly, including when it is not.
• The lot certificate of analysis: IV, PVC content, moisture, colour, flake size or pellet form, as applicable to the grade.
• Packing and shipping basis: jumbo bags or octabins, bale or flake loading, FOB/CIF/DDP options, and the weight tolerance per shipment.
• Documentation for your own recycled-content reporting: post-consumer origin, grade, and the weight of recycled material per shipment.

What we will not do

We do not describe material as food-grade when the recycling installation is not listed in the EU register, and we do not count post-industrial regrind as post-consumer content. European buyers audit this line by line — a supply relationship built on a claim that does not hold up is worth less than the shipment.

We supply from a partner recycling plant; the plant details, grade list, monthly capacity and the EU registration status of the recycling installation are confirmed in writing with the quotation.

Specifications

Frequently asked questions