WRAP, (the Government’s Waste & Resources Action Programme) says it has begun negotiating contracts to provide financial support to potential recyclers following the successful completion of the first commercial trial of plastic milk bottles containing recycled HDPE.
The initiative saw Nampak’s Newport Pagnell, UK plant manufacture 60,000 four-pint plastic bottles incorporating 30% recycled content, for subsequent sale in Marks & Spencer stores last December. The culmination of a three-year project building on earlier research by Linwood Foods, the bottle manufacturing project was able to be completed by an international team that included representatives from Nampak Plastics, dairy company Dairy Crest, the Fraunhofer Institute, Sorema, Erema and Nextek, only after extensive testing to ensure compliance with food packaging legislation. WRAP says there was “no adverse reaction” to the packaging containing recyclate from M&S consumers, which it claims proves the recycled content bottles were “indistinguishable’ from their virgin counterparts.
The production process saw post-consumer bottles first sorted by infra-red detectors and manually to separate out natural HDPE bottles. These were then flaked and washed in a 2% caustic solution at 93 degs C to remove all surface dirt, paper labels and adhesive. The flakes were then dried and colour sorted before being put through a “super-clean” process, after which the new food grade polymer was added to virgin HDPE at 30% and made back into polythene milk bottles by Nampak.
Paul Davidson, WRAP plastics technology manager, says: “This large-scale trial proves beyond doubt that milk bottles containing recycled material from this process are every bit as good as 100% virgin bottles. They meet all the necessary criteria, both in terms of safety, production, filling and transportation and, critically, consumer acceptance. We are now looking forward to seeing milk bottles containing recycled plastic becoming a common occurrence on UK supermarket shelves.”
James Crick, Nampak’s commercial director, adds: “Manufacturing these bottles provided some degree of technical challenge, although the main challenge would have been in the supercleaning process; by the time we received the HDPE it had been supercleaned and was in pellet form. We await further developments and news of WRAP’s contract negotiations with interest. There is certainly sufficient recyclate available in the UK; it is now a question of enough companies being prepared to invest in the recycling equipment required.”