250 million kilograms of orange peels are left over every year in the Netherlands.

They mainly come from Dutch supermarkets or the catering industry after producing fresh orange juice. Unfortunately, the peels used to be thrown away among regular organic waste, which is a pity since they can be reused as raw materials.

For this reason, PeelPioneers proposed in 2017 to separate citrus peels from organic waste and process them separately into secondary raw materials. The market liked this circular, innovative idea and, thus, helped PeelPioneers grew from a start-up into a scale-up and raise an investment of over one million € in 2018.

PeelPioneers used it to build its plant in Son and has since become the first business worldwide that recycles citrus peels into secondary raw materials with a 100% circular solution.

Part of the success also comes from Renewi. Within this circular partnership, Renewi collects discarded citrus peels from different customers across the Netherlands and transports them to PeelPioneers' site.

PeelPioneers processes over 40,000 kg of citrus peels per day into essential oils and citrus pulp, which are used, among other things, as ingredients for food, cleaning agents and high-quality supplementary feed for livestock. Nowadays, 50% of the citrus peels that PeelPioneers recycles come from the Dutch retailer Jumbo and its 140 stores. That's why Jumbo and PeelPioneers are processing part of the peels into ingredients for the new line of Jumbo private label cleaning products.

PeelPioneers and Renewi recycle over 10 million kg of orange peels per year thanks to continuous optimisations of our collection processes and PeelPioneers' processing line.