Industry Alert | Concerned About Recycling Challenges, Tea Drink Brands Urged To Optimise Bottle Design To Improve Recyclability

As consumers demand for packaging convenience and food safety continues to grow, many tea beverage brands in the market are choosing to add oxygen absorbers to PET bottles to extend the shelf life of their products and improve oxygen barrier properties. However, this additive becomes a major challenge during the recycling process. The presence of oxygen absorbers makes the bottles prone to yellowing when dried at high temperatures, which not only affects the quality of the recycled material, but may also lead to downgrading of the whole batch of recycled material.

Above:before and after baking of PET bottle with oxygen absorber 

In order to cope with this problem, the industry is currently adopting two main measures:

Firstly, at the raw material entry stage, bottles containing oxygen absorbers are removed through automated sorting equipment or manual screening;

Secondly, after drying, colour sorters are used to further separate yellowed bottles.

However, there are obvious limitations to these measures. There are many brands and series of tea beverages on the market, and new products are constantly being launched, making it difficult to completely exclude oxygen absorber-containing bottles from the recycling stream. Even with the use of advanced colour sorting technology, it is impossible to completely avoid "leakage", resulting in increased production costs and a serious impact on the quality and market value of the recycled plastics.

In addition, these yellowed bottles are usually not available for high-value recycling and can only be downgraded or sent to incineration or landfill disposal, or even leaked into the environment under improper management, posing a potential threat to the ecosystem. This unsustainable development model not only has a negative impact on the environmental image of the company itself, but also poses an obstacle to the global goal of a circular economy.

In view of this, KiTech calls on relevant tea beverage brands to consider the feasibility of recycling from the product design stage. By improving the bottle formula, choosing more environmentally friendly materials, or adjusting the label design, they can meet the product protection needs without adversely affecting the subsequent recycling process.

KiTech is always committed to promoting the technological progress and green development of the plastics recycling industry, and is willing to work hand in hand with industry partners to build a more sustainable future. We believe that through upstream and downstream cooperation, we can effectively reduce the impact of packaging waste on the environment, achieve efficient recycling of resources, and contribute to the sustainable development of the planet