With their slogan, “Join the circular revolution!” the packaging experts at Greiner Packaging are calling on customers and industry colleagues to join them on the path to a sustainable circular economy. At FachPack in Nuremberg, Germany, the company will present the solutions it has developed to help achieve this goal.
Keeping PET in circulation
By acquiring its first recycling company – Serbian producer of r-PET flakes, ALWAG – Greiner Packaging has entered the recycling business and taken a vital step on its journey into a sustainable future. Taking over the Serbian location, which will operate under the name Greiner Recycling d.o.o. going forward, secures important material streams for the company and reinforces its commitment to promoting a circular economy. Greiner Packaging recognizes the potential of circular-ready PET and has set itself the goal of driving forward the development of a PET tray-to-tray recycling stream to complement the existing bottle stream, which already functions well. This backward integration step is an important milestone on the journey.
At FachPack in Nuremberg, the company will present packaging solutions made of up to 100% r-PET that it has already successfully implemented and reveal what the food packaging of the future could look like – whether for salads, spreads, convenience foods, or dairy products. In the future, it will even be possible to use r-PET for products requiring hot sterilization by utilizing the temperature-stable material r-PET HTS® .
r100: the self-separating cup
One innovation that combines two of the “Rs” – reduce and recycle – is the self-separating cardboard-plastic combination K3® r100. The cardboard wrap, which lends sturdiness to the thin walls of the plastic cup, separates itself from the cup during the waste collection process. This means that the cardboard and plastic can be assigned to the correct material streams during the initial sorting process, before the packaging even arrives at the recycling facility – an innovative development that makes cardboard-plastic combinations substantially easier to recycle.
