According to the company’s website press release on April 3, 2023, Indorama Ventures Public Company Limited (IVL), one of the world’s leading sustainable chemical companies, and Evertis, a pioneer in sustainable PET barrier films, are collaborating to use flake from recycled PET trays to produce PET film suitable for food packaging trays. The partnership is an important step in diverting PET trays from landfill or incineration to support the EU’s recycling targets and create a circular economy for PET trays.
After six years of research and development, Indorama Ventures is commercially producing recycled PET (rPET) flakes from post-consumer trays in their Verdun facility in France, which are comparable in quality to flakes originating from bottles. This development supports a closed-loop economy for PET trays by giving consumers more sustainable options and enabling packaging producers to meet their recycled content targets. It also protects and preserves food, reducing about 154 million tons of food waste costing €143 billion per year across the EU1.
Marta Matos Gil, Chief Sustainability Officer at Evertis, said, “PET trays are crucial to provide safety and convenience to consumers, ensuring longer shelf life for food and reducing waste. For some time, our industry has had a goal to create circular solutions for these essential products. Indorama Ventures’ innovative recycling methods shows how we can create a truly circular economy by developing infrastructure and capacity to collect, sort and recycle PET trays and transform them back into valuable raw material. This partnership helps Evertis to meet our sustainability goals and boost our product innovation in terms of circularity, recyclability, and eco-design. This is crucial in the current market, where our clients face new packaging regulations and consumers are concerned about the environmental impact of the products they buy. Evertis can meet both those needs.”
Indorama Ventures’ solution increases the total amount of recycled PET availability with the new tray-to-tray recycling workstream. According to the company, the new recycling technology has the potential to divert more than 50 million post-consumer PET trays from landfill or incineration each year2.
Yash Lohia, Chairman of IVL’s ESG Council said, “We can support a circular economy by conducting rigorous testing at every stage of the process, from sorting and recycling to conversion, to ensure the highest quality. Our Deja™ sustainable ingredients brand, including rPET, supports the EU’s plastic collection and recycling targets.”
The partnership supports Evertis’ 2025 target of 50% post-consumer recycled content in their products. In 2019, the company obtained the ECOSENSE certification3, renewed in 2023 as the RETRAY certification , which verifies the recycled content in film production.
As the most recycled plastic in the world4 , PET is driving sustainable growth due to its recyclable, flexible, safe and lightweight properties. This collaboration helps close the loop on PET tray-to-tray recycling, diverting PET from landfill or incineration and fostering more sustainable production towards a circular economy.
1) EU wastes more food than it imports, says new report (eeb.org), Feedback-EU-2022-No-Time-To-Waste-report.pdf (feedbackglobal.org)
2) Based on annual capacity.
3) PET Packaging Food preservation - Circular Economy (evertis.com)
4) “Baseline report on plastic waste,” UNEP, 2020
