Safety Evaluation of Polyethylene Terephthalate Chemical Recycling Processes

Frank Welle
Additional contact information
Frank Welle: Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging (IVV), Giggenhauser Straße 35, 85354 Freising, Germany

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 22, 1-10

Abstract: Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is one of the main packaging materials for beverage bottles. Even if this polymer is good to recycle, mechanical recycling processes need a well-sorted input fraction. For less-sorted PET packaging, or even non-food input sources, chemical recycling seems to be a solution to increase PET recycling. For post-consumer recyclates in packaging applications, it is essential that the safety of the recyclates is guaranteed, and the consumers’ health protected. For mechanical recycling processes, evaluation criteria are already established. For chemical recycling processes, however, such evaluation criteria are only roughly available. This study evaluated the safety of the chemical recycling process similar to the approach of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). However, due to the lack of information about the contamination level of the input materials for the chemical recycling process, the evaluation was adapted. In addition, the evaluation should be performed separately for the depolymerisation and for the repolymerisation steps. However, due to the high cleaning efficiencies of both steps, the evaluation can focus on the repolymerisation. This simplifies the assessment of the chemical recycling processes considerably.

Keywords: circular economy; polyethylene terephthalate beverage bottles; chemical recycling; food law compliance; diffusion modelling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/22/12854/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/22/12854/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:22:p:12854-:d:683846

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().