IN Brief:
- Coexpan is developing rPS Food for post-consumer recycled polystyrene in food-contact packaging.
- The platform targets form-fill-seal and thermoformed applications, including yoghurt cup-to-cup circularity.
- The project addresses growing pressure around recyclability, recycled content, material traceability, and food-contact compliance.
Coexpan is advancing its rPS Food platform as the rigid packaging sector works to establish a food-contact circular route for post-consumer recycled polystyrene.
The company, part of Grupo Lantero, has developed rPS Food for incorporating recycled polystyrene into food-contact packaging used in form-fill-seal and thermoforming processes. The platform is intended to support cup-to-cup circularity, where a yoghurt cup can be mechanically recycled and returned into a new food packaging application.
Coexpan has worked with recycling partner Eslava on decontamination technology for post-consumer recycled polystyrene suitable for food-contact standards. The company has positioned the work as a route to reducing virgin raw material use while retaining the functional advantages that polystyrene provides in selected chilled and dairy applications.
Polystyrene remains widely used in yoghurt and other thermoformed food packs because it offers stiffness, formability, processability, and cost efficiency. Those attributes have made it a strong fit for high-volume dairy packaging, particularly where form-fill-seal lines require consistent material behaviour at speed. The same installed base now faces stronger pressure from packaging policy, retailer requirements, and circularity targets.
The challenge is not simply to add recycled material. Food-contact recycled polymers must pass through controlled collection, sorting, cleaning, decontamination, processing, and validation before they can safely return to direct contact with food. Input contamination, odour, colour variation, legacy additives, mixed materials, labels, lids, and food residues all create technical barriers.
Polystyrene has a different recycling profile from PET beverage bottles, where established collection streams and food-grade recycling technologies are more mature. As calculation and verification methods for PET recycled content become clearer, other polymer systems will face growing pressure to prove their own circular pathways with comparable evidence.
Yoghurt cups and thermoformed food packs are often collected through mixed household streams, where separation quality can vary widely. A credible rPS food-contact system therefore depends on more than conversion technology. It needs feedstock control, sorting accuracy, recycling validation, packaging performance, regulatory acceptance, and customer confidence.
Line compatibility will be critical. Dairy and chilled food manufacturers cannot adopt a recycled-content material that causes brittle forming, weak seals, inconsistent cutting, poor stacking, unacceptable colour shift, or higher rejection rates. Packaging circularity has to survive industrial line conditions, not just laboratory validation.
Thermoformed cups also have to protect the product through filling, sealing, cooling, storage, transport, retail display, and consumer handling. Stiffness, rim formation, sealing surface quality, wall thickness, printability, and compatibility with lids all affect pack performance. A recycled material that changes any of those variables must be trialled carefully before adoption at scale.
The development of rPS Food sits within a wider regulatory environment that is pushing all packaging systems toward stronger evidence. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, EPR fees, recyclability assessments, and customer sustainability requirements are all changing the economics of material choice. Polystyrene users will need credible routes that show the material can remain part of a circular packaging system rather than being treated as a legacy format.
A controlled cup-to-cup model gives polystyrene one possible route. Its success will depend on whether enough post-consumer material can be recovered at the right quality, whether decontamination processes satisfy food-contact requirements, and whether converted packs perform reliably on existing production assets. Closed or semi-closed loops may be easier to validate than broad mixed-waste recovery, although they require coordination across retailers, waste operators, recyclers, converters, and food manufacturers.
Coexpan’s work gives the dairy packaging sector a practical test case. If rPS Food can scale beyond demonstration and maintain line performance, it could help preserve a material familiar to yoghurt and chilled dessert manufacturers while reducing reliance on virgin polymer. If feedstock quality or regulatory validation proves too difficult, material substitution pressure will increase.
Food-contact circularity will ultimately be judged by safety, consistency, and industrial reliability. Coexpan’s rPS Food platform shows how polystyrene packaging suppliers are trying to keep pace with that new standard, where recyclability alone is no longer enough.
