Understand Your Business Waste Streams

Waste-Free Tuesday: ♻️

Understanding the available recycling stream

Pact also examined the materials available for manufacturing. Initially, clear PET trays represented only around 5% of the material in PET bales from materials recovery facilities (MRFs), limiting the supply available for tray-to-tray recycling.

Pact began supplying trays containing a minimum of 50% New Zealand recycled PET bottle flake. This initiative repurposed approximately two million recycled PET bottles each month, using an available waste stream while the supply of recovered trays developed.

Improving design and material recovery

New Zealand’s restrictions on certain single-use and hard-to-recycle plastics supported further progress. Removing contaminants such as EPS and PVC from kerbside collections helped improve the recycling stream, allowing more tray material to be recovered for manufacturing.

Cross-industry collaboration also enabled Pact to introduce a mono-PET tray and welded-film solution, diverting a further three tonnes of plastic film from landfill annually. The solution received Australasian Recycling Label (ARL) approval as recyclable.

Together, these changes helped increase PET tray material in MRF bales from around 5% to more than 18%, enabling Pact to incorporate more recovered tray material into new trays.

Turning waste-stream knowledge into products

Pact New Zealand now uses recovered tray material in the manufacture of more than 200 million meat trays annually.

Its experience shows how understanding business waste streams can inform procurement, product design and manufacturing. For other organisations, the starting point is practical: examine what you purchase, use, sell and discard. Identify unnecessary materials, investigate better packaging options and work with suppliers and recovery partners to understand which materials can become inputs for new products.

Watch the Video here: NZ Tray2Tray Evolution (long) | Videos & Movies on Vimeo

Understand Your Business Waste Streams: How Pact Group Turns Recovered PET into New Products

For Pact Group, understanding waste streams means looking beyond what goes into the bin. It means examining the materials businesses purchase, the packaging they produce and what happens after customers use it—and using that knowledge to create new products.

In 2015, Pact Packaging set an ambitious goal: to establish a circular tray-to-tray solution, giving PET thermoformed trays used and recycled by New Zealand consumers the opportunity to become new trays.

Achieving this required technical expertise, production trials, changes in packaging design and collaboration across the supply chain.

Identifying opportunities to replace landfill waste

An early opportunity was replacing packaging that could not be recovered through existing recycling systems.

Foodstuffs’ transition to Pact’s PET Moisturelock trays diverted more than 100 million non-recyclable expanded polystyrene (EPS) trays and soaker pads from landfill annually. Its move to clear PET trays for chicken and pork also supported Pact’s longer-term objective: recovering clear material that could be reprocessed into new clear trays.

The business lesson was to consider both product performance and the material’s potential value after use when selecting packaging.