To manufacture the blister packs for the packaging of WC FRISCH Kraft Aktiv Pro Nature Pack, Henkel has so far used recyclate from the PET bottle collection. Due to their high purity and the low complexity of the sorting, these are particularly suitable for high-quality reprocessing. In order to develop household collection into a closed cycle, it is important that the yellow bag is used even more as a source of raw materials. That’s why Henkel switched the Pril hand dishwashing detergent bottle bodies produced in Germany to 50 percent recyclate from the Yellow Bag as early as 2022.
Expansion of sorting and recycling technologies
"While the recycling streams for returnable PET bottles and PET bottles from the yellow bag are already very well established, there is still a lot of potential in the reuse of PET trays from the yellow bag," says Ulf Timmann, Head of Global Packaging Home Cleaning in the detergents and cleaning agents department at Henkel. “This is because plastic trays are often multi-layer packaging that cannot be processed into high-quality recyclate due to their complexity. Plastic shells made of mono-material, on the other hand, can be recycled very well, but usually only end up in thermal recycling, since they are not sorted separately and the corresponding recycling streams are not yet sufficiently available.”
As a result, valuable PET tray material is usually not returned to the material cycle and reused. To change this, Henkel, together with Boldog Consulting and the film manufacturer PETman, is using a specially adapted recycling and manufacturing process. With the pilot project, the partners want to promote the expansion of sorting and recycling technologies for material from the dual system.
