Support our Planet – Circularity is Key in Food Packaging

At Faerch, Material choice and design are essential to fully close the loop in food packaging. To transition into a circular economy, we need to see positive changes in product design from producers, waste management infrastructure from governments and littering behaviour from end-consumers.

Eco-design is fundamental

In order for us to lead the transition to a circular economy within rigid food packaging, the availability of post-consumer household waste is crucial. However, this is one of our greatest challenges, as demand is significantly increasing, and plastic packaging collection rates are generally stagnating. This makes it difficult to source sufficient household waste material of the right quality. However, we are seeing tailwinds from legislation with commitments to circularity, which is being rolled out in the coming years through taxes and Extended Producer Responsibility schemes.  This will incentivise the use of circular materials when designing packaging products.

To encourage circularity and support the availability of tray waste, it is important that we interact directly with retailers and customers to create closed loops through take-back systems. An example is Faerch’s Back at Store Programme with UK’s largest retailer, Tesco. The programme sees 2,000 tonnes of retail ready tray waste going into a circular loop each year.

We have also recently launched our Tray 2 Tray by Faerch™ Programme, which sees kerbside collected waste being diverted away from landfill or incineration and used as recycled content in new primary food packaging. The launch of Faerch's Tray 2 Tray by Faerch™ Programme,  is an essential initiative that drives positive change one step closer to truly circular food packaging, proving our commitment to working with customers to keep rigid food packaging in the economy, and out of the environment.

Being reliant on circular, mono-PET input material, Faerch, as a producer have a responsibility and a great incentive to support the loop, with products that can feed into our own recycling plant. Our acquisitions in recent years underline our commitment to lead the transition to circularity in food packaging, as well as our continuous journey to convert into mono-material PET.  

Reducing waste streams

Our recycling business enabled recycling of around 34,000 tonnes of household waste in 2022. The capacity is expected to grow in coming years in accordance with our business plan to scale up tray recycling.

In 2023, our new tray wash line will be installed at our recycling plant Cirrec in the Netherlands. This will increase capacity to around 55,000 tonnes and more than triple our PET tray recycling capacity, as we discontinue our current bottle wash line to accelerate tray-to-tray recycling.

For more information please visit our website faerch.com