According to §21 of the new packaging act, which comes into force on 01.01.2019, licensing fees for packaging will be based in future not only on waste prevention but also on packaging recyclability.
“An infrastructure for sorting and high-grade recycling of all aluminium packaging and packaging containing aluminium foil is already available in the market place. This ensures that the valuable aluminium contained in mono-material or composite packaging is not lost but returned efficiently and in a resource-conserving manner to the material loop,” explains DAVR’s managing director Hans Jürgen Schmidt. “However, a purely quantitative consideration of the recyclable material content should be extended to include consideration of the intrinsic value and marketability of material components in order to reproduce the real-world economic and ecological added value situation during the post-use phase,” adds Schmidt.
According to the statement the recycling rate in the aluminium packaging industry is over 87 per cent today. It therefore already exceeds the level of 80 per cent stipulated by the packaging act for 2019 and is very close to the figure of 90 per cent laid down for 2022.
“The German public’s willingness to collect packaging together with the highly developed infrastructure for sorting and recycling waste ensures that aluminium from packaging is returned to the material loop and used to make new products and packaging. In this respect, permanent materials like aluminium that can be recycled again and again without any loss in quality are in a particularly strong position,” says Gregor Spengler, head of Packaging at GDA.
