Together with its cooperation partner Alpla, the Mainz-based branded goods manufacturer Werner & Mertz has succeeded in making another packaging in its product portfolio more sustainable: Since September 2023, the bottles of the pipe cleaner Rorax have been made of 50 per cent red post-consumer recyclate.
So far, around 230,000 bottles have been placed on the market. The special feature: until now, there was no possibility of high-quality recycling for coloured plastic from the Yellow Bag. Thanks to an additional step in the recycling process red-coloured flakes sorted out and reused become.
Fine sorting makes high-quality reuse possible
Recycling plants usually only offer three different recyclate qualities: Transparent, white and the coloured residue, which is melted down to a grey in the further processing stage and which is largely only suitable for use in downcycling. Technically, sorting by other colours is possible - but there must also be buyers for it. A further (fine) sorting step is necessary for this and only one colour can be sorted in each run.
Werner & Mertz consistently uses recyclate from the Yellow Bag and packaging based on the Design for Recycling principle as part of its Recyclate Initiative founded in 2012. Transparent and white bottles are therefore standard. The Frosch brand even dispensed with the brand-specific green in the closures in order to improve recyclability. With Rorax, the red colour of the bottle, which is common for pipe cleaners, serves as an indication of the powerful formula. Werner & Mertz approached the specialists at ALPLArecycling to make this packaging sustainable as well: Together they developed a solution.
„ALPLA supports recycling processes by sorting into ‚mono colours‘ in its recycling plants and processing the material into coloured rHDPE. In this way, we offer our customers the opportunity to reprocess it into bottles of the same colour. Together with Werner & Mertz, we have managed to get a high proportion of red recyclate into a new bottle.“
Michael Heyde, Head of Technology at ALPLArecycling
High-quality upcycling instead of low-quality downcycling
After sorting out the white and transparent flakes, another colour is removed from the coloured residue before it is processed further. With the Development of red post-consumer recyclate (PCR) flakes for packaging the cooperation thus prevents red PCR from flowing into inferior applications via downcycling.
„The processing of the red recyclate in our Rorax bottles is another special milestone in our recyclate initiative. By utilising the red recyclate, we have now succeeded in removing another colour from the recyclable material stream via mechanical recycling and keeping it in a high-quality cycle. Together with our cooperation partners, we are successfully driving forward the technological utilisation of used plastic from the Yellow Bag.“
Alexander Schau, Head of Packaging Development at Werner & Mertz
Source: Werner & Mertz
