Page 21 - Packaging News magazine March_April 2023

AIMING FOR FOOD GRADE
One of the most awkward to recycle plastic fractions happens to be soft film plastics – precisely the materials REDcycle was collecting. In the most recent update on Australia’s progress towards the 2025 National Packaging Targets from the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO), soft plastic recycling rates are around four per cent. The rest is landfilled.
The four per cent that do get recycled are only being turned back into rela- tively low-value products, as the current industrial recycling of post-consumer polyolefin films struggles to deal with the complex mixtures and does not have any suitable decontamination processes that would allow closed loop food-grade compliance for the recycled material.
By 2030,
the energy embodied in items that get thrown away will represent up to 15 per cent of our current CO2 emissions.
As these soft film plastics are com- monly used for packaging both edible and non-food goods, they play a fundamental role in protecting and extending the shelf life of many foods, which is why, turning these soft plastics back into food-grade polyolefin films, not just diverting them away from landfill and recycling them into high value products, would have a huge impact on lowering their carbon footprint and reduce producers’ reliance on using virgin materials.
And now we have the technology to achieve this. A ground-breaking pro- cess, based on supercritical CO2 to decontaminate plastic films back to food-grade quality, aims to fill the gap in the recycling stream where food-safe post-consumer polyolefin films are cur- rently missing.
This innovative commercial pro- cess, COtooCLEAN, can be integrated into mechanical recycling operations and uses super-critical CO2 (scCO2) combined with green co-solvents to remove oils, fats and printing inks in a single step, effectively decontaminating polyolefin films under Challenge Test conditions back to food contact levels.
This technology, which not only offers a new recycling stream and facilitates
significant reductions in waste to land- fill, displacement of virgin resin, and significant savings in resources and reductions in carbon emissions and water usage, is poised to help Australia’s soft film plastic recycling systems.
COLLECTION CRITICAL
In the first instance, however, it is criti- cal to resume the likes of REDcycle’s collection as soon as possible to min- imise the impact on consumer’s confidence in the recycling ecosystem and their current habit of returning soft plastics to store.
While the film material collected will still have to be stored for a period, local councils and businesses involved in film manufacture could step in to develop a range of appropriate new markets while recycling facilities are scaled up.
Certainly, the end markets are there for the recycled material, particularly for food-grade recycled film. While there still are technical hurdles to be ironed out, the collection should continue to ensure sufficient feedstock is available when the recycling plants require the higher vol- umes to make their operation viable.
Ultimately, we all need to ensure that nothing produced slips out of its own loop. In the plastics sector alone the British Plastics Federation estimated that if all plastic were recycled globally this could result in mean annual sav- ings of 30 to 150 million tonnes of CO2, equivalent to shutting between 8 and 40 coal-fired power plants globally.
Australia needs to boost its recycling ambitions and put the packaging sector on track for climate neutrality. This is not a lofty vision – it is an urgent warn- ing to keep the planet’s climate within liveable limits and avoid life-changing scenarios. ■
COtooCLEAN
The COtooCLEAN project, led by Nextek’s Australian CEO, Prof Edward Kosior, to produce food-grade recyclate from polyolefin film waste, recently won the Alliance to End Plastic Waste $US3 million prize for its winning process based on supercritical CO2 to decontaminate plastic films back to food-grade quality. The process can be integrated into mechanical recycling operations and can treat printed and multi-layer films to make them much easier to recycle.
reducing our household waste footprint. By 2030, the energy embodied in items that get thrown away will represent up to 15 per cent of our current CO2 emissions. Between now and then, carbon emissions associated with the production of what eventually becomes municipal waste will grow by up to two-thirds, undermin- ing efforts in other areas of the economy that are getting the most attention, such
as energy and transport systems.
The sheer volume of waste and its mismanagement pose the twin threats of direct pollution and loss of resources, poised to increase as populations con-
tinue to grow.
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SUSTAINABILITY