The fight against plastic has a new enemy: disposable trays.
Widely used in supermarkets, disposable plastic trays enter the small food trade to wrap fresh products, replacing traditional transparent plastic bags of a lifetime.
According to the latest data from the Agència de Residus de Catalunya (ARC), the number of disposable plastic trays used has increased by more than 70% in two years: from 238 million in 2018 to more than 406 million in 2020.
Catalans have gone from consuming 32 disposable trays per year to 53, according to the ARC study.
Fresh products such as meat, fish, fruits and some pre-cooked or ready-to-cook foods arrive in disposable trays to our homes to further complicate the separation of waste and fill our trash bins ahead of time. How far will the industry's deployment go with single-use packaging?
Although cardboard packaging is gaining ground as the most widely used option (35%), the combined share of the different types of plastics and resins still accounts for the majority, at 58%. Unlike disposable plastic bags, trays are not subject to specific regulations, which explains why they have become popular so quickly, replacing traditional plastic bags that are regulated.
Plastic bags, banned since 2021, have fallen by 70%, while white polystyrene trays flood Spanish supermarkets.
“The tray is a complete disaster,” says José López Aguilar, the Elisava researcher who highlights the enormous difficulties involved in recycling disposable trays. The plastic film wrapping is not recycled, and the tray itself also poses problems for recovering the material: “If it is PET plastic, it is usually multilayered, with different materials mixed together, and this complicates recycling, while cardboard, apart from permeability problems with fresh food, ends up being used to package precisely everything that would normally need no packaging,” the expert concludes.
The Generalitat is preparing a new waste law to promote reuse as an alternative to disposable packaging. The next objective is plastic trays, which European legislation has left in a kind of legal vacuum.
