Faerch Group, the leading rigid food packaging manufacturer and integrated recycler, presented the rebranding of its subsidiary 4PET Recycling into CIRREC. The new name reflects the company’s commitment to truly circular recycling in food packaging. With additional capacity ordered, CIRREC scales tray-to-tray recycling to countries across Europe and drives the development of establishing food grade trayrPET regenerated from pots, tubs, and trays as a new commodity in the market, the company says.
The new name CIRREC emphasises the company’s focus on ‘CIRcular RECycling’. In contrast to down-cycling, circular recycling brings products back into their original application without loss in quality and food safety. Functional properties like food grade quality, colour, impact strengths etc. are preserved or fully recovered in the process.
“In a truly circular economy, food packaging becomes food packaging again. Bottles are recycled back into bottles, food trays become food trays again. Clear remains clear, and mixed colours are used for non-clear applications like in Evolve by Faerch,” Lars Gade Hansen, CEO of Faerch Group said. “Each application cleans up for itself and provides its own feedstock. The textile industry does not steal from packaging and tray manufactures stop stealing from the bottlers,” he says. “This is what we call true circularity. And this is what we believe the future of rigid food packaging will be.”
The launch of the CIRREC brand marks the achievement of important milestones: Firstly, already today, CIRREC processes industrial volumes, recycling the equivalent of 1.2 billion food trays annually. This roughly reflects the entire Dutch market of sorted rigid PET household food packaging or, alternatively, the total amount of sorted PET pots, tubs and trays in Scandinavia.