Henkel has reached another milestone in the field of sustainable packaging: from now on, 50 percent of the bottle bodies of the hand dishwashing liquid Pril produced in Germany will be made of recycled material from the yellow bag. Recycled beverage bottles are used for the remaining share, so that the bottle bodies are made of 100 percent recycled PET (rPET).

For sustainable packaging concepts, the yellow bag is becoming increasingly important as a source of raw materials to promote a closed-loop economy. However, the recycling rate of the packaging material collected via the Dual System in Germany is still low. This is due, among other things, to the complexity of sorting and reprocessing this material. "Packaging materials collected via the yellow bag are significantly more heterogeneous than deposit bottles and sometimes heavily contaminated," says Carsten Bertram, head of international packaging development in the dishwashing detergent division at Henkel. "For a long time, high-quality recyclate from the yellow bag was therefore not available in sufficient quantities. However, thanks to the cooperation with the packaging manufacturer and plastics recycler Alpla, we are now a big step further."
Henkel has already been working together with Alpla on innovative and sustainable packaging solutions for several years. The long-standing partner company has continuously expanded its sorting and recycling technologies. Already at the beginning of last year, Henkel was able to use packaging made with recyclate from the yellow bag for some of its products. Now Henkel has switched all packaging for hand dishwashing detergents produced in Germany to high-quality PET recyclate from the yellow bag. In the future, the proportion of recycled material from the yellow bag is to be further increased. In addition, the conversion is also to take place for other consumer goods products from Henkel.
"We are very pleased to accompany Henkel in the conversion of its packaging. Investments in modern recycling structures are only possible if there is sufficient demand for recyclate from the yellow bag on the part of the industry. Henkel is sending an important signal here," says Dietmar Marin, Managing Director of the Recycling Division at Alpla.
The project is a further step on the way to a circular economy, which Henkel is driving forward with ambitious goals. By 2025, 100 percent of packaging is to be recyclable or reusable*. In addition, the amount of new plastics from fossil sources in Henkel's product packaging is to be reduced by 50 percent by increasing the share of recycled material to over 30 percent and reducing the volume of plastics overall.
"To enable a functioning circular economy in the long term, it is important that all packaging is designed to be recyclable, that the necessary recycling infrastructure and technologies are in place, and that post-consumer recyclate is also reused to produce new packaging as standard," says Bertram.
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