A piece of deli-meat packaging turned into a public bench, a glass bottle reinvented by a glassblower... There are some lovely stories out there about objects finding an original second life through recycling. Stories that make you smile — and that deserve to be told. But they don't tell you what happens, every single day, to the vast majority of your packaging waste. Here is that story. An everyday story — and a brilliant one.
The goal is closed-loop recycling
At Fost Plus, we don't dream of turning your bottles into works of art. We prefer a far less spectacular, but far more effective scenario: a bottle becoming a bottle again. A can becoming a can again.
In industry jargon, that's called closed-loop recycling. It's what most people picture when they think of circularity — and rightly so: it's the ultimate goal.
Why? Because it's the most direct way to accelerate the transition to more sustainable raw material management: every packaging that becomes the same packaging again is oil, sand or ore we don't have to extract.
The undisputed champion: the PET bottle
This is, today, recycling's finest achievement. The PET from the clear and blue bottles you sort is turned into new bottles at a rate of more than 90%.. In practice: the water bottle you toss into your PMD bag (Belgium's bag for plastic, metal and drink cartons) has a very good chance of being back on a supermarket shelf a few weeks later, as a brand-new bottle.
This result is no accident. It rests on exceptionally high sorting quality in our Belgian sorting centres, and on long-term contracts that Fost Plus signs with recycling partners such as FILAO and Morssinkhof.
Glass, the indestructible one
Glass is also a champion in a league of its own: it can be recycled almost endlessly, without ever losing quality. Every glass bottle or jar collected can, in theory, become a new glass container over and over again.
Recycling glass also takes much less energy than producing it: the temperature needed to melt glass cullet is significantly lower than the temperature required to make new glass from raw materials. The result: less CO2, and a container that can be given a new life again and again.
And where there isn't a closed loop yet
Let's be transparent: not every packaging follows that ideal path yet, for various reasons — food safety, for instance, or technical constraints.
For recycled plastic to be allowed back into food packaging, it must meet strict conditions: it must either come from packaging waste that itself once held food, or have been processed — through chemical recycling, for example — to reach a quality equivalent to virgin plastic.
There are also technical reasons. Some packaging isn't properly recognised by sorting machines, or its material doesn't yet have its own dedicated recycling stream. In those cases, it ends up in a mixed stream, which is recycled into granulate or injection-moulded products: garden edging, flower boxes, benches, traffic islands.
That's not closed-loop recycling in the strict sense. But it's not a failure either: it's still packaging that ends up neither incinerated nor in nature. Waiting for the perfect solution before acting would do the environment no favours — recycling what can be recycled today, while continuing to improve the system, that's circularity too.
Innovating to open up new loops
This is where Fost Plus is stepping up its efforts today — not just to recycle more, but to recycle better. A few concrete examples currently under way:
- HolyGrail 2030: a pilot project — the first of this scale in Europe — testing invisible digital watermarks that make it possible to separate flexible food packaging (crisp bags, biscuit wrappers) from non-food packaging during sorting. The goal: to eventually produce a recyclate pure enough to become food packaging again.
- Chemical recycling, which can give certain plastics a quality equivalent to virgin plastic, including for food use. Since 2025, some meat trays on supermarket shelves already contain chemically recycled plastic sourced from your own PMD bag.
In short
A bench made from deli-meat packaging, a work of art in recycled glass: we love it, and we understand why people are talking about it. At the same time, the real story of recycling at Fost Plus plays out on a completely different scale — in sorting centres, recycling plants, and pilot projects, day after day. Its goal is anything but spectacular: that every packaging becomes, as much as possible, the very same packaging again.
