ERDE expands perforated foils collection service

The ERDE (Erntekunststoff- Recycling Deutschland) initiative will begin the nationwide collection of perforated foils for the first time in the 2021 season.

The perforated foils used in the cultivation of strawberries, lettuce or new potatoes can be returned by the farmer to the EARTH collection points and thus used for high-quality material recycling.

The suppliers of perforated foils for the German market, the companies RKW (Germany) and Sotrafa (Spain), ERDE management and RIGK GmbH as the operational ERDE system operator have recently agreed on this.

Stefan Kwiatkista, Sales and Business Development Manager at r RKW Agri GmbH & Co.KG, said: “As a founding member of the IK initiative ERDE, we strive for a sustainable solution for all types of harvest plastics in our product portfolio at the end of their lifecycle. We are pleased that we can now also offer our perforated film customers an attractive disposal concept under the umbrella of ERDE, with which the valuable raw materials can be recovered through recycling."

RIGK’s Boris Emmel said: "In a pilot project in 2020 we were able to prove that the problem of the adhesion of sand and organic residues in perforated foils can be adequately solved by pre-cleaning by the farmer and subsequent cleaning by the recycler. Each type of agricultural film behaves differently in this regard, so that preliminary investigations are always necessary."

With the inclusion of the perforated film in ERDE's collection concept, another harvesting plastic for special crops has now been added to the asparagus film. Since ERDE now covers the collection for the entire range of agricultural plastics in animal feed production (flat silage film, stretch film, nets, yarn), disposal solutions for other harvest plastics in the field of special crops are being worked on.