Page 15 - Packaging News magazine July-August 2022

July – August 2022 | www.packagingnews.com.au | SUSTAINABILITY
15
If we are to cap the production of virgin plastic without dramatically boosting our recycling capacity, we may find ourselves staring down another gun barrel with an equally high carbon footprint.”
REFRAMING THE SCIENCE
Despite these technological advances we may still face the huge constraints of big volume polyolefins recycling, precisely at a time when we need to be accelerating the research and technol- ogy developments in this direction.
According to a recently published paper by scientists Roland Franz and Frank Welle, of the Fraunhofer IVV, over-conservatism in the way food safety factors are calculated during the recycling and migration processes might significantly underestimate the safety of recycled plastics in packaging applications and overestimate the risks posed to consumers by high perfor- mance sorting and recycling processes. As a consequence, this could generate high, if not insurmountable, barriers to the application of post-consumer recy- clates for food packaging; something
that risks creating a stranglehold on recycled food-grade resins, especially the polyolefins, and counteracting the circular economy targets.
As Franz and Welle point out, consideration of the input levels of possible harmful contaminants in the recycling stream is a primary pillar in EFSA’s safety assessment framework. The statistical deter- mination of such concentrations in washed flakes as raw input material for super-clean recycling is therefore important. They go on to say that it is quite obvious that this element is not a static figure and that these levels will change if different re-collection streams are used. Moreover, once re- collection streams are established the input concentrations will change and reduce over the years due to improve- ments in consumer behaviour, and
ABOVE: NextLoopp is already trialling prototype food-grade recycled PP (FgrPP) and inert (INRTgrade) resins in injection moulding, extrusion and thermoform package manufacturing.
also due to changes in the reduced use of hazardous chemicals and their lack of availability to the consumer. However, such data are largely, and broadly, lacking.
EFSA assumes the presence of genotoxic substances in the recycling feedstock even though genotoxic sub- stances cannot be used in any goods placed on retail shelves, and that over-estimative prediction models for the migration calculation are used. These worst-case assumptions at every step make the overall evalu- ation extremely conservative.
Using the modern recycling infra- structure and the latest recycling technologies that we now have, to reframe the science and basic
continued overleaf ❯
TM