Dutch plant recycles trays into food packaging
At a single site in the Netherlands, over 60,000 tonnes of PET trays are recycled into food packaging every year, equivalent to more than three billion ready-meal trays. This is made possible by Dutch firm Cirrec, which has overcome the challenge of sorting plastics with the help of recycling technology specialist Steinert.
Cirrec’s recycling plant in Duiven has moved beyond pilot scale, with the bottleneck being sorting rather than washing or extrusion. The company can transform all plastics into food-grade material, avoiding downcycling or exports, thanks to Steinert’s technology.
Under EU Regulation 2022/1616, only plastics that have already been in contact with food may re-enter the food packaging cycle. A ready-meal tray qualifies, but a PET blister pack for screws does not, despite being chemically identical.
Conventional near-infrared (NIR) sorting systems are no longer sufficient for food-grade recycling, as they see PET as PET regardless of its origin. Simone Tirelli, technical project manager at Faerch, notes that achieving the standard required for food-grade recycling demands exceptional precision in sorting.
Breakthrough with Sensor Fusion and AI
The breakthrough came with sensor fusion and artificial intelligence. At the Duiven site, Cirrec operates three Steinert Unisort PR EVO 5.0 sorting systems, each analyzing individual trays using two data streams simultaneously. A hyperspectral NIR camera captures chemical information, while a color camera records visual features.
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The combined data feeds into Steinert’s intelligent object identifier, an AI-based sorting program trained to recognize food packaging. The system identifies patterns associated with food trays, including shape, surface texture, and typical printing, rather than relying on chemistry alone.
The result is a sorting purity exceeding 95%, the threshold required for food-grade recycling. Once purity is achieved at the sorting stage, the rest of the process becomes predictable, with incoming bales passing under a Steinert UME overhead magnet to remove ferrous metals, followed by optical sorting and processing into flakes and pellets.
Impact and Scalability
The recycled material feeds directly into production within the Faerch group, with new packaging containing around 70% recycled content on average. A life-cycle analysis shows that tray rPET produced at Cirrec generates 57% fewer CO₂ emissions than virgin PET, a reduction that matters for brand owners facing regulatory pressure and carbon reporting requirements.
Cirrec is currently the only operator worldwide recycling post-consumer PET trays into food-grade material at industrial scale, demonstrating that circularity for rigid food packaging is technically and economically viable with high enough sorting performance. Steinert’s intelligent object identifier can be retrained as input streams change or new packaging formats enter the market, without requiring hardware replacement.
Steinert, a family-owned business based in Cologne, has a history dating back over 135 years and is one of the world’s leading experts in sensor sorting and magnetic separation for waste, glass, and metal recycling, as well as mining. With 550 employees and an annual turnover of approximately EUR 180 million, the company has subsidiaries in Germany, Australia, Brazil, and the US, and 50 sales partnerships and joint ventures across the globe.
