Plastics Recyclers Europe (PRE, Brussels / Belgium; www.plasticsrecyclers.eu), the organisation representing Europe’s plastics recyclers, has warned that current plastic packaging design does not take into account the existing EU recycling targets. Instead of putting performance maximisation at the forefront, PRE asks that recyclability become a requirement equal in importance to other performance criteria. Doing so, the association says, will ensure that a package can be fully emptied and also will limit the use of different combinations of polymers and materials that are incompatible with existing recycling processes.

The European recycling body therefore calls for an EU-wide classification system to assist designers in evaluating their products from a recyclability point of view. Such a system, PRE says, should also include several options that will allow packaging creators to choose from a range of options to improve their particular class.

To drive this development, the association has come up with RecyClass, a common market approach building on the existing “Design of Recycling Guidelines”. The project offers an easy method to determine a package’s recyclability, which is graded on a scale of A to G, comparable to the existing EU energy efficiency classes. Paolo Glerean, the head of PRE’s packaging design task force, said the method is already being tested by several technical institutes across a number of countries.