Food-grade rPET

Food-grade rPET is recycled PET permitted to touch food — a legal status, not a cleanliness adjective. Under the framework of Regulation (EU) 2022/1616 (mirrored in UK provisions), it must be produced by an authorised super-clean decontamination process — vacuum, high temperature, solid-state treatment validated by challenge tests — from input collected in controlled food-contact streams, at a registered installation, and each delivery must carry a Declaration of Compliance naming the process and permitted conditions of use.

Standard hot-washed flake is the input to such processes, never itself food-grade — a distinction this site repeats deliberately, because the market blurs it constantly. Buyer's checklist: which registered process, what input control, where is the DoC. A supplier fluent in those three answers is selling compliance; one who is not is selling adjectives.