Opaque White Bottle-to-Bottle Recycling Proven with 100% rPET

Swiss masterbatch producer Sukano and French PET bottle machinery builder Sidel collaborated on a project to confirm the bottle-to-bottle recyclability of opaque white light-barrier PET dairy bottles. The firms report that white PET bottles could be made with up to 100% regrind from similar bottles with no detectable color change or loss of light barrier and at the same throughput rate.

 

 

Monolayer white bottles were made with a Sukano masterbatch and blown into bottles on Sidel’s latest-generation EvoBlow two-stage rotary machine. The bottles were then recycled according to the European PET Bottle Platform (EBPB) protocol. This included melt filtration; no agglomerates were found. Solid-state polymerization (SSP) restored the IV to a level of 0.7-0.8. New bottles were made from 25%, 50% and 100% recyclate and additional Sukano white PET masterbatch (except for the 100% rPET bottles). In all cases, light barrier was confirmed for extreme conditions, such as less than 0.1% light transmission at 550 nm wavelength. “We saw no measurable difference in processing conditions or blowing output while processing the 100% recycled white PET material from Sukano white masterbatches, even under most challenging conditions,” said Naima Boutroy, Sidel global packaging expert.