EU PET bottle recycling rate rises - report

Related tags Recycling Polyethylene terephthalate

Petcore and EuPR announce 2011 European PET Bottle collection figures
Petcore and EuPR have said that European post-sorting polyethylene terephthalate (PET) collection reached 1.59 million tonnes last year, an increase of 9.4% on 2010.

Growth in collection remained stable at 2% for the 27 EU countries and net exports of PET bales to the Far East fell for the third year running.

All but three of the surveyed countries have a collection rate above the 22.5% target rate for plastic recovery set by the Packaging Waste Directive and overall collection rate in 2011 was 51% of all PET bottles in the market.

Roberto Bertaggia, chairman of the Petcore board, said: “The PET industry chain has worked with compliance agencies, national bodies and European recyclers to achieve the record collection of nearly 1.6 million tonnes of PET bottles​.”

The chairman of the EuPR PET Working Group, Casper van den Dungen, said: “Capacity utilisation of our recycle plants is only 77% at present.

“This provides the challenge for municipalities, other collectors and industry to increase the current collection rate even further to load the recycling facilities already in place.”

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