Recycled plastics in beverage packaging: advantages & challenges

Amrik Singh, Senior Design Engineer and Researcher at The University of Huddersfield, School of Computing and Engineering, discusses the advantages and challenges associated for the use of recycled PET and HDPE plastics with virgin materials in mass-produced beverage bottles and caps found in research.

Convenient single use of virgin and recycled plastics beverage packaging used in bottles and caps are typically designed to meet manufacturers' specifications and branding requirements while ensuring compliance to governmental regulations on food safety, hygiene, and sustainability standards.

Under EU Directive 2019/904, the EU has set targets for minimum recycled content use with virgin plastic for bottles and caps used for the beverage packaging industry. The required recycled plastic content is set at 25% by 2025 and 30% by 2030, with potential increases to 65% beyond 2030 under amendments to the Packaging and Waste Regulations. This legislation seeks to reduce virgin plastic use, improve sustainability, and minimise environmental impact.

The advantages

Recycled plastics offer several benefits for mass-produced beverage applications:

• Lightweight & durable: Compared to alternative materials, plastics provide ease of handling, durability, and reduced transportation costs.
• Recyclability: PET and HDPE, among others, can be reprocessed, reducing dependence on virgin materials and lowering environmental impacts.
• Cost-effectiveness: Plastic remains an economical choice for large-scale production due to its relatively low material and processing costs.
• Reduced dependency: On virgin oil-based plastics

While the EU and UK aim to promote the use of recycled plastic content, it is crucial to balance these efforts against the three pillars of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic factors. A life cycle perspective must consider key challenges such as plastic recycling efficiency, material traceability, contamination, cost, health implications, and the impact on material properties.

Figure 1 highlights the challenges faced by the plastics industry with the increasing use of recycled plastic content, particularly when recycling rates remain low compared to the global production of virgin plastic. Addressing these issues is essential to improving sustainability and advancing circular economy goals.Figure 1 : Global Plastic Waste - OECD 2019

The challenges and limitations

Despite recycled plastic advantages, several critical concerns must be addressed:

• Environmental impact: The global plastic waste crisis remains a pressing issue. According to the OECD (2019), only 9% of plastic waste was successfully collected and recycled for reuse, while 19% is incinerated, 22% is either openly burned or dumped into the environment, and 50% ending up in landfill sites.

• Mechanical degradation: Recycled plastics do not retain mechanical properties. The more this material is recycled the more these properties diminish rendering the material to be down cycled or incinerated. Repeated recycling reduces the mechanical integrity of plastics.

• Regulation uncertainty: Evolving UK and EU regulation can create compliance challenges requiring companies to invest and adapt quickly.

• Plastics traceability: Tracking plastics that are recycled from collection to reuse for beverage packaging applications requires advanced traceability systems which are often fragmented which require stringent quality control.

• Health impacts: Plastic packaging degrades over time, leading to microplastic contamination in ecosystems. This also poses potential health risks to humans due to microplastics and the leaching of harmful chemicals into beverages consumed.

• Higher processing costs: Recycling plastic is often more expensive than producing virgin plastic in life cycle and can discourage investment to achieving full sustainability.

• Food safety concerns: Contaminated recycled plastics, especially if not properly treated, pose hazards in food and beverage applications due to possible chemical leaching and bacterial contamination so care and safety control is paramount.

Balancing sustainability and practicality

The effectiveness of using recycled plastics in beverage packaging is highly dependent on the implementation of robust collection, sorting, and purification processes and testing to ensure structural integrity.

While recycled plastics can contribute to sustainability goals, their usage must be carefully managed and balanced to ensure material safety, performance, and minimal environmental harm. Achieving a viable solution requires investment, integrating improved recycling infrastructure, closed-loop systems, that enhance long-term sustainability and safety.

References

1. EU Directive 2019/904 : Single Use Plastic and Labelling Requirements
2. EU Regulation (EU) 2022/1616 : Regulating Recycled Plastics for Food Contact
3. EU Directive 94/62/EC : Packaging and Packaging Waste
4. OECD (2019): Only nine percent of plastic recycled worldwide: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and development.
5. PPWR (Formally EU 2025/40) : Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation