Henkel Uses Recycled Material for Blister Caps of WC Fragrance Flushers
In a pilot project, Henkel is now using 100 percent post consumer recyclate (PCR) from the yellow bag for the blister caps of its “WC Frisch Kraft Aktiv Pro Nature Pack” cleaning product for the first time. The PCR used consists of more than 80 percent recycled PET trays, which are used for food products, for example, and have not been recycled as standard until now. With this project, Henkel aims to help further exploit the recycling potential of the Dual System in Germany and initiate a new recycling stream.
To manufacture the blister caps for the packaging of “WC Frisch Kraft Aktiv Pro Nature Pack,” Henkel has so far used recyclate from PET bottle collections. These are particularly suitable for high-quality reprocessing due to their high purity and low sorting complexity. In order to also develop household collection into a closed loop, it is important that the yellow bag is used even more as a source of raw materials. For this reason, Henkel has already converted the material of the bottle bodies of its hand dishwashing detergent Pril produced in Germany to 50 percent recyclate from the yellow bag in 2022.
Expansion of sorting and recycling technologies
“While the recycling streams for PET deposit bottles and PET bottles from the yellow bag are already very well established, there is still a lot of potential in the reuse of PET trays from the yellow bag,” says Ulf Timmann, Head of Global Packaging Home Cleaning in Henkel’s Laundry & Home Care business. “This is because plastic trays are often multilayer packaging that cannot be processed into high-quality recyclate due to their complexity. Plastic trays made of mono-material, on the other hand, could be recycled very well, but they also usually end up only in thermal recycling because they are not sorted separately and corresponding recycling streams are not yet sufficiently available.”
As a result, valuable PET tray material is usually not returned to the recyclable material cycle and reused. To change this, Henkel, in cooperation with Boldog Consulting and the film manufacturer PETman, is relying on a specially adapted recycling and manufacturing process. Through the pilot project, the partners aim to promote the expansion of sorting and recycling technologies for material from the Dual System, according to a press release.
“By sorting the plastic trays from the yellow bag well according to material and color, we can now produce monolayer films of high and stable quality. These films are formed into high-quality blister hoods that are virtually indistinguishable in quality from the current blister hoods made from recyclate from the deposit bottle system,” says Kenneth Boldog, managing director of Boldog Consulting. “
