16th Inno-Meeting: Interseroh on packaging recycling routes

The 16th Inno-Meeting, entitled ‘Closing the loop’, will be held on 20 February. Around 150 decision-makers from the food and packaging industries will meet in Osnabrück for this well-established two-day annual workshop, which is organised by innoforum. Valerie Bürstner, a circular economy and resource expert from environmental service provider Interseroh, will open the second day of the conference with a keynote on the topic of ‘Plastics and films: packaging recycling routes today’.

Recent developments in the plastics market such as the German Packaging Act or the increase in recycling quotas are benefiting the closed-loop economy. An increasing volume of plastics is now being reprocessed to replace primary material in manufacturing. A proportion of the plastic packaging collected from private households cannot be recycled, however, due to being mis-sorted or because of its material, colour or similar reasons.

“To comply with the quotas, we not only need improvements in communication, technological innovations, and closer cooperation between designers, sorters and recyclers, but also an expansion to the secondary raw material market,” explains Bürstner, who works as Head of Marketing at Interseroh. “We are nowhere near achieving the full potential for the recycled packaging material that is returned to the loop.”

Interseroh offers an integrated portfolio of services along the entire value chain: from licensing to waste management and sorting to the reprocessing of secondary raw materials.

In her presentation, Valerie Bürstner will be explaining just how this packaging sorting and recycling works. Bürstner: “By deploying the latest technological developments in our high-tech facilities, we can now achieve a level of quality for reprocessed material that is identical to that of the primary resource.”