Significant quality boost to the Danish recycling of glass and metal

VANA has just selected and entered into agreements with the sorting and recycling plants that will henceforth process Danish glass and metal packaging. The new agreements cover all of Denmark and set ambitious requirements for reuse or circular recycling. The expectation is that this can support a broad investment and quality improvement for the entire industry.

When the extended producer responsibility for packaging comes into effect in Denmark on October 1, approximately 7000 companies will be affected by it. All companies that place packaging on the Danish market will then be responsible for the packaging throughout its entire life cycle - even after the packaging is empty and sorted as waste by the end user. They will fulfill this responsibility through mandatory membership in a producer responsibility organisation (PRO).

High Recycling of Glass

To ensure the best environmental utilisation of glass, VANA has entered into an ambitious treatment agreement with Krogh's Bottle Recycling in North Zealand. The agreement ensures that bottles collected in bottle containers throughout the Capital Region will be sorted, washed, and refilled. The CO2 burden from recycling bottles is approximately half as much as melting glass into new bottles, according to the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

For glass and bottles from the rest of Denmark, VANA has entered into a significant treatment agreement with Reiling in Næstved, which will ensure high-tech sorting and processing of the glass so that it can be melted down into new packaging glass. This also occurs in Denmark at Ardagh in Holmegaard.

Many Danish municipalities have chosen to collect household glass mixed together with metal, requiring extra sorting to separate the two materials afterward. In Funen, VANA has reached an agreement with Marius Pedersen to carry out the sorting at their facility in Odense. In Southern Jutland, glass/metal will be sorted at Ribe Flaskecentral, and from Midtjylland, glass/metal goes to Meldgaard in Kolding. Finally, in Zealand, Reiling will step in. Overall, VANA's agreements ensure the processing of approximately 125,000 tons of bottles and glass, for which the producer responsibility organisation takes responsibility, of which more than 95 percent will be reused or recycled.

“We have high expectations of our agreement partners, and we are pleased to see how, for instance, Meldgaard has already invested in new sorting technologies that ensure a gentler sorting of glass/metal with minimal crushing. It is also very positive that Meldgaard manages to use crushed glass, which is too small to be recycled into new glass, so that it instead is used in local production of filtration systems and blasting material for facade renovations,” says Marianne Roed Jakobsen.

More circular metal recycling

In the metal sector, VANA has entered into processing agreements with the companies Posibi and Denova. Denova will receive and sort metal from North Zealand, while Posibi will handle the metal from the rest of Denmark. Just like with bottles and glass, most of the sorting must occur at Danish facilities, which reduces the CO2 burden from transportation. The choice of Posibi and Denova also ensures more gentle sorting of the light household collected metal fraction.

”This means, among other things, that aluminum cans are sorted as a completely pure can fraction, which enables circular recycling into new cans. Overall, we expect that our chosen partners can achieve a higher recycling rate of metal compared to today, as their gentle sorting provides cleaner fractions and only a very small sorting residue for incineration,” says Marianne Roed Jakobsen.