Only every second disposable PET bottle is recycled as a bottle in Germany. This was the result of a study by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (ifeu) in cooperation with the Society for Packaging Market Research (GVM) on behalf of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Germany, from which the newspapers of the Funke media group (Saturday editions) quote. “97 percent of all PET one-way returnable bottles in Germany are returned via the deposit system, but only 45 percent of them are used again for PET bottles,” says the study.
Downcycling as a Problem
According to the study, most of the returned high-quality PET material is used for packaging for cleaning products, cosmetics or textiles. This means that reusable plastic is downcycled – i.e. a devaluation of the recycling material, since it cannot be reused for the production of beverage bottles due to strict legal requirements.
According to the report, a bottle-to-bottle system could make an important contribution to climate protection, in which only new beverage bottles are made from old PET bottles.
New plastic could be saved
According to the study, there is enough material in Germany to produce 90 percent of all new disposable bottles from recycled PET (rPET). This could save on the production of new plastic and reduce greenhouse gases at the same time.
“Beverage manufacturers should be able to be the first to access the recycled PET material in order to be able to make beverage bottles out of it again,” said Tilmann Rothammer, member of the management board of Coca-Cola Germany, the Funke newspapers. “The ‘bottle-to-bottle’ principle is essential for us in order to break the current downcycling spiral by recycling as closed loops as possible.”
