The Danish packaging manufacturer Faerch group officially opened its new recycling plant in Duiven, the Netherlands, on 18 April. Located in the province of Gelderland, the site has an input capacity of 60,000 tonnes per year and is operated by group subsidiary, Cirrec. It will process post-consumer PET trays collected from households across the region using a mechanical recycling process, Faerch reported.
The packaging company did not disclose how much it had invested in the five-year project. "Today, true circularity in PET has become a reality in the Benelux, Germany, and Sweden," Jan Thorsgaard Nielsen remarked at the grand opening. Nielsen is the Chief Investment Officer of A.P. Møller Holding A/S, which has owned Faerch Group since 2021.
Cirrec specialises in the mechanical recycling of PET and aims to close the loop for rigid food packaging. Faerch claims to hold a 20 per cent share of the global plastic packaging market, representing approximately 24 billion products sold each year. The new Cirrec plant meant that around three billion of these products would be truly circular. The group has set itself a target of leading the conversion from polystyrene and polypropylene to PET in packaging and creating a fully circular economy. Faerch said that it currently achieved circularity for around 13 per cent of the items that it sells.
Faerch Group's Dutch subsidiary Cirrec, which traded as 4PET Recycling up until June 2023, specialises in the collection, sorting and mechanical recycling of PET trays and cups in Europe. Cirrec reportedly recycled the equivalent of 1.2 billion food trays in 2022.
The company has operated a tray-to-tray recycling plant in Duiven since 2018. According to Faerch’s sustainability report, the firm produced about 12,000 tonnes of recycled PET out of post-consumer trays last year.
