This file photo from July 28, 2021, shows free bottled water placed at the office of the Busanjin Ward in the southeastern port city of Busan. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Feb. 24 (Korea Bizwire) — The environment ministry said Thursday it will launch a new initiative with the aim of enabling the reuse of transparent polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles as food containers through physical processing rather than chemical processing.
The ministry issued a notice on the revision of facility and quality standards that the sorting and recycling businesses should comply with during the process of recycling and turning transparent PET bottles into new containers for food and beverages.
Thus far, the reuse of waste plastics for the production of containers with direct contact with food has been limited to chemically decomposed and purified ones or byproducts generated from new materials.
Under the newly-revised standards, however, recycling businesses wishing to produce recycled materials for food containers should have separate recycling facilities dealing with transparent PET bottles, including crushing and optical sorting facilities.
The recycled materials for use in the production of food containers should be collected and transported without being mixed with other plastic materials. The sorting businesses need to store and compress them separately, and only transparent PET bottles can be used.
Ashley Song (ashley@koreabizwire.com)
