WRAP Announces Success of Commercial Trial for HDPE

The first successful commercial trial of plastic milk bottles containing recycled HDPE, using world first technology has been completed this month.

The trial, which involved the production of 60,000 recycled content milk bottles for commercial sale, is the culmination of a three-year project. The project was initiated and funded by WRAP, and is aimed at developing a recycling process capable of producing food grade polythene from milk bottles. The project was delivered by Nampak Plastics, Dairy Crest, the Fraunhofer Institute, Sorema, Erema and Nextek.

The commercial demonstration of ‘closed loop’ recycling for milk bottles takes post-consumer scrap bottles and recycles them back into new milk bottles.

Jennie Price, Chief Executive of WRAP, says: "This is a major breakthrough for UK recycling. Incorporating recycled plastic into everyday products like milk bottles is vital if we are to gain the maximum environmental benefit from recycling, and is great news for the growing numbers of people who are recycling their plastic bottles."

Once collected, the post-consumer bottles are sorted by infra-red detectors and by hand to separate out natural HDPE bottles. The bottles are flaked and washed to remove surface dirt, paper labels and adhesive. The flakes are dried and color sorted before the dried flakes are put through a ‘super-clean’ recycling process. The new food grade polymer is then added to virgin HDPE at 30 percent and made back into polythene milk bottles.

WRAP is now negotiating contracts to provide financial support to potential recyclers to get the process commercially established in the UK.