PACT GROUP & PARTNERS CREATING CIRCULAR SOLUTION FOR PET TRAY-TO-TRAY RECYCLING

Australia’s Pact Group has partnered with three companies to create a circular solution for the thermoformed PET meat trays – as well as fruit and vegetable punnets – used by the country’s grocers.

Based in a Melbourne suburb, the firm is working with Hilton Foods, Woolworths Group and Cleanaway Waste Management on the project. For the first time in Australia, it will enable meat trays to be collected, recycled and remanufactured into new meat trays ready for the supermarket shelves.

It’s a large-scale collaboration. Pact Group has 133 locations, some 6,000 employees and contractors, and operates packaging, recycling and reuse divisions. Hilton Foods creates and produces packaged meat, seafood, meat alternatives and pre-prepared food products at scale. Woolworths is Australia’s largest retailer. And Cleanaway describes itself as “Australia’s leading total waste management solutions provider.”

A recent report notes that Australia is one of the largest consumers of meat in the world, eating an average of 23.7 kg of beef per capita compared to the global average of 6.3 kg. “But,” it notes, “our love for meat comes at a cost, producing an enormous amount of waste simply from the packaging it’s contained in.”

Since these meat trays, as well as many fruit and vegetable punnets, typically are made from PET, they are cost effective to manufacture, lightweight, durable, and recyclable.

Even so, roughly 90 percent this meat tray packaging currently goes to landfill after use, even if consumers place it in their curbside recycling bins. 

The Australian Packaging Covenant Organization (APCO), in a report on the nation’s packaging consumption and recovery, estimated that in 2021-22 of the 43,000 tonnes of trays placed on the Australian market, just 5,000 tonnes were recovered for recycling.

Even then, APCO said, most of it was either downcycled for industrial products or commingled with other PET waste material and exported, which does not advance Australia’s aim of creating a domestic circular economy for plastic packaging.

So the four Australian companies partnered to develop a solution.

After used meat trays and punnets have been collected through curbside recycling bins, they are sent to a material recovery facility (MRF), compacted into bales and transported to the Pact-operated Circular Plastics Australia recycling facility in the country’s southern state of Victoria. (PKN Packaging News reported that this A$50 million plant began operating late last year with the capacity to recycle up to 1 billion 600-ml PET plastic beverage bottles a year.)

At this site the company sorts the trays and punnets, shreds them into flakes, and then washes and sanitizes the resulting material.

Pact sends the clean flakes to one of its packaging manufacturing plants where it presses them into thin, thermoformable sheets of recycled plastic. Pact uses this sheet material to make the classic meat tray in addition to other food containers, ranging from bakery clamshells for cookies and cakes, and punnets for fresh fruit and vegetables.

Here’s a short video about the project.

These containers can be recycled multiple times, enabling Australia’s first-ever tray-to-tray solution.

Pact Group said it aims to recycle more than 1,000 tonnes of used trays and punnets in its first year of production, which would divert the equivalent of about 48 million meat trays from landfills.

The company stated: “We hope to grow our tray-to-tray solution so all Australians can benefit from the positive environmental and economic impacts from recycling used plastic packaging and remaking it locally for our local businesses.”