Unilever to recycle PET to food-contact grade packaging

Unilever has teamed its food packaging researchers with start-up Ioniqa, based at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and Indorama Ventures to turn PET waste into transparent virgin grade material.

The technology has successfully passed its pilot stage and is now moving towards testing at an industrial scale.

Only around 20 per cent of PET packaging is recycled, Unilever found, with the rest either incinerated, disposed of in landfills or leaking into the natural environment.

Ioniqa’s new technology takes non-recycled PET waste - like coloured bottles - and breaks it down to base molecule level, while separating the colour and other contaminants. The molecules are converted back into PET which is equal to virgin grade quality at Indorama’s facility.

If proven successful at industrial scale, in future it will be possible to convert all PET back into high quality, food-grade packaging. The three partnering companies believe that this fully circular solution could lead to an industry transformation, since the new technology can be repeated indefinitely.

Chief research officer at Unilever, David Blanchard, said: “We want all of our packaging to be fit for a world that is circular by design, stepping away from the take-make-dispose model that we currently live in. This innovation is particularly exciting because it could unlock one of the major barriers today – making all forms of recycled PET suitable for food packaging. Indeed, making the PET stream fully circular would be a major milestone towards this ambition, not just helping Unilever, but transforming industry at large.”