News
09.10.2026
What scaling circularity has taught us
During Climate Week NYC, Pernille Lind Olsen, CEO of Faerch, joined Hernan Saenz, Head of Strategy & Transformation at Bain & Company, to discuss why Faerch invested early in circularity, what that decision enables today, and what it has taught us about making circular food packaging work at scale.
For Faerch, the decision to invest in recycling was based on a simple principle: valuable packaging material should not become waste.
Waste carries both a financial cost and a carbon footprint. Keeping material in use can reduce both and shift packaging from a linear model to a circular one.
That connection led Faerch to invest early in recycling infrastructure. Today, we can recycle post-consumer packaging back into material for new food packaging at industrial scale.
Interview with Pernille Lind Olsen and Hernan Saenz
Our recycling facility in Cirrec, the Netherlands
Insight across the loop
Our integrated recycling facility in Cirrec, the Netherlands, gives us more than access to recycled material. It gives us first-hand insight into what can be recovered, where material is lost, what quality comes back, and how packaging design affects recyclability.
It also gives us verifiable data: the carbon footprint of our tray-to-tray recycled PET is about 80% lower than virgin PET, and Faerch was the first to publish a tray-to-tray rPET emission factor in the Sphera database.
That knowledge feeds back into how we design packaging and develop circular solutions, helping us understand not only how a product should be designed for recycling, but what needs to happen across the system to keep its material in circulation.
One key lesson is that circularity is rarely limited by technology alone. Many of the technologies needed to enable circular food packaging already exist. Success depends on how effectively actors across the value chain work together.
Designing the system for circularity
Designing packaging for recyclability is essential, but it is only one part of the challenge. Packaging must also be collected, correctly sorted, recycled into high-quality material and used again. No single company can make all of that happen alone.
The bigger question, then, is not whether packaging can be recycled, but how we create a system that keeps material circulating.
That requires collaboration across the value chain and openness about what each partner needs, from material quality and volumes to collection, cost and operational requirements. By understanding these constraints and working through them together, we can move beyond optimising individual parts of the value chain towards making the whole system work.
Smukfest provides an example of how a closed-loop system can work in practice. Since 2023, in collaboration with Royal Unibrew, Dansk Retursystem, and Smukfest, we have developed a system that collects festival cups and recycles them back into food-grade material for new cups. In 2025, 97% of the cups at Smukfest were collected for recycling, demonstrating what's possible when packaging design, collection, sorting, recycling, and demand for the recycled material are all considered together.
