Sulayr × Join Forces: European PET Tray Recycling Enters New Phase

The PET packaging recycling sector in Europe shows clear divergence: bottle-to-bottle recycling technology for beverage bottles is already highly mature, while recycling of PET food trays remains in its early stages. According to Packaging Europe, PET trays account for approximately one-quarter of all PET packaging in circulation in Europe, yet their recycling rate remains below 30%.

Unlike PET bottles, PET trays do not have a dedicated recycling system and are usually included in the recycling process with mixed household packaging waste. Moreover, PET trays are often multi-layer composite structures containing various additives or combined with other plastics. This material complexity significantly increases the sorting difficulty and poses many challenges for the production of food-grade recycled materials.

Objective: Achieve industrial "tray-to-tray" recycling

Spanish company Sulayr has pioneered a solution to this challenge. At its Granada facility, the company has implemented a standardized "tray-to-tray" (i.e., "clear-to-clear") recycling model aimed at processing post-consumer PET trays into new, transparent, food-grade trays, with full traceability throughout the entire process.

To bring this model into industrial production, Sulayr partnered with Tomra, a sorting technology company, to complete the factory's technological upgrade. The project's core was not simply integrating individual equipment, but building a stable end-to-end system—covering raw material feeding, sorting and processing, up to food-grade recycled PET (rPET) extrusion molding.

Taoliang Sorting Technology Empowers Sulayr Industrial Recycling

The core of this solution is the Tomra Dual-Channel Autosort sorting system, which uses near-infrared (NIR) technology to identify different types of plastics and material characteristics. The system first accurately extracts PET material from mixed feedstock, then removes remaining impurities, ensuring high throughput while achieving improved material recovery rate and final purity.

After crushing, the material is subjected to fine sorting by the Innosort Flake flakes sorting system. This equipment simultaneously identifies and sorts flakes by polymer type, color, and transparency, enabling multi-stage material purification. The integrated material recovery process also recovers high-value PET from waste streams, further enhancing yield.

Both parties stated that this integrated process can stably maintain the purity of recycled material above 99.8%, with quality approaching that of virgin PET, enabling direct use in new food packaging production. Meanwhile, high recovery rates and low loss rates also enhance the project’s overall economic efficiency.

Relying on market demand and customer customization standards, this industrial production line can also process certain colored PET trays, thereby further enhancing production flexibility.

Deep cooperation opens up new market areas

Improved product quality stability has enabled Sulayr to meet more stringent customer requirements, successfully expanding into new market segments and serving food-grade PET tray processors and packaging manufacturers across multiple European countries that require certified, traceable recycled materials.

Tomra not only provided Sulayr with tailored equipment selection but also offered optimization solutions for production line layout and pre-processing procedures, ensuring materials enter the sorting unit in optimal condition.

Jesús Espinar, Area Sales Manager at TOMRA, said, "Our core mission is to assist in designing a stable and reliable process that continuously produces high-quality recyclates that meet European regulatory requirements."

Antonio Jesús Marcos, Marketing Director of Sulayr, stated frankly: "The collaboration goes far beyond equipment installation. Both parties have reached a strong consensus on process details, performance metrics, and long-term stability, and close cooperation with TOMRA during the system integration phase was key to the project's success."