The European Association of Plastics Recycling & Recovery Organisations (EPRO, Brussels/ Belgium; www.epro-plasticsrecycling.org) has awarded car seats for children, manufactured by the French company Team-Tex (Charvieu, Isère) as “Best product containing recycled plastics for 2009”. The competition is organised to promote the recycling of plastics and this year received entries from 13 European countries.

Second place was awarded to Pilot (Annecy / France; www.pilotpen.eu) for its bottle-to-pen – “B2P” – pen manufactured from 89% recycled material and shaped like a bottle. Third place was awarded jointly to the “Nobody Chair”, designed in Denmark and produced in Sweden from materials supplied by Wellman International (Fort Mill, South Carolina / USA; www.wellmaninc.com), and “Rfresh” PET trays for food, produced by Linpac Packaging (Birmingham / UK; www.linpacpackaging.com) in Germany and the UK.

The competition focused on several criteria – all entries had to contain at least 50% recycled plastics, which had to be recycled packaging, and manufactured in Europe. EPRO aims to use the awards to raise awareness of consumers who spend time on a regular basis sorting their used packaging. It says the winning entries are evidence that recycling is worth the effort and highlight the range of options and applications for recycled plastics packaging.

Francis Huysman, co-chairman of EPRO, said: “EPRO have been delighted by the level of interest in the competition and highly encouraged to see how far the recycled products industry has advanced. We are grateful to those organisations that entered the competition and reassure you that it was not easy to agree on our winner and runners up. We plan to hold this competition each year and it will be interesting to see new products in 2010”.