Page 14 - Packaging News magazine July-August 2022

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SUSTAINABILITY | www.packagingnews.com.au | July – August 2022
Harnessing the new era of recycling
Professor Edward Kosior, CEO and founder of Nextek, breaks down what the industry should be doing to harness the new era of plastic recycling.
eliminating all contaminants from post-consumer waste that could be harmful to human health, as well as proving that the recycled material does not change the food composition, taste, and odour in an unacceptable way. Up until about two years ago the technology did not exist to achieve this, hence our reliance on virgin plastics for food packaging.
We are now entering a new era for recycling as innovative technology ushers in transformational shifts in what can be achieved, not only to sort post consumer packaging, but also to effectively eliminate any potential residues in the recycled plastics.
NEXTLOOPP is one such initia- tive that is now able to close the loop on food-grade post consumer PP. The global multi-participant proj- ect, that uses innovative technology by Nextek, differentiates itself by integrating a unique decontami- nation process post sorting, and is already trialling its prototype food- grade recycled PP (FgrPP) and inert (INRTgrade) resins in injection moulding, extrusion and thermoform package manufacturing.
Having successfully completed challenge tests as recommended by USFDA and EFSA, which require deliberately contaminating the plastic material to higher levels of contam- ination than typically found in the post-consumer stream, and measur- ing the rate of decontamination of the recycling process, NEXTLOOPP has been able to prove that its processes can strip out any migratable materi- als to safe levels.
FOLLOWING the United Nations’ decision to adopt a global and legally-binding treaty by 2024 to end plastic pollution, an interna- tional group of scientific experts is calling for a cap on production of virgin plastics leading to phaseout
of new production by 2040. According to scientists from the
UK, US, Canada, Germany, India, Norway, Sweden and Turkey, even when applying all political and tech- nological solutions available today, including substitution, improved recycling, waste management, and circularity, annual plastic emissions into the environment can only be cut by 79 per cent over 20 years.
As such, they believe that ending plastic pollution also requires a dra- matic change on the supply side.
The time for preventing plastic pollution is long past – the time for changing the future of plastics in our world is now.
BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS
Yet we can’t cap virgin plastic produc- tion without taking drastic measures to step into the plastics gap with alter- native solutions that effectively close
the loop on our current post consumer material streams.
As global environmental awareness now appears to be reaching a critical tipping point, there is an urgent need to break down those barriers that are still holding recycling back. These include some of the more stringent challenges of meeting global industrial recycling standards for food-grade resins that would benefit from taking into account the many transformational recycling solutions coming on-stream.
Currently, food-grade resins repre- sent only 10 per cent of the global annual capacity of recycled polymers of over 45 million tonnes, of which slightly over 20 per cent is food-grade rPET compared with only three per cent of food-grade polyolefins (according to ICIS Mechanical Recycling Supply Tracker).
This underscores the serious need to boost production of food-grade recycled polypropylene (PP) given that roughly 20 per cent of the world’s virgin plastic production is PP.
TECHNOLOGY BRINGS TRANSFORMATION
Working towards achieving high- quality food-grade PP resin requires