INEOS joins Holy Grail 2.0 digital watermarking initiative

Mark Victory

26-Jul-2022

LONDON (ICIS)–INEOS has joined Holy Grail 2.0, a pilot digital watermarking initiative backed by the European Brands Association (AIM), and the Alliance to End Plastic Waste.

Digital watermarks add imperceptible optical codes directly on to the surface of packaging which can contain a wide range of data such as plastic type and composition, manufacturer, traceability data, and whether material has been used in food contact applications.

The focus of the Holy Grail 2.0 scheme – which launched in December 2020 – is on improving the sorting of post-consumer packaging waste for onward recycling, such as being able to separate former-food and non-food packaging.

Meeting European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) requirements for food packaging is currently a significant challenge for recycled polymers, with the exception of recycled polyethylene terephthalate (R-PET).

EFSA requires that 95% of material used in food-contact approved recycled material must have originated from a food contact source.

For  R-PET, this is relatively easy to ensure since the bulk of collected material is from post-consumer drinks bottles.

For other polymers where end-use sources are varied and typically collected in a single input stream, it is an intense challenge and barrier to market growth.

The only currently available source of post-consumer food-grade recycled polyolefins, for example, is limited to the UK recycled high density polyethylene (R-HDPE) market, where used milk bottles create a separable and easily identifiable source of input material. In the majority of the rest of Europe, milk bottles are manufactured from PET.

There is also some food-grade mechanically recycled polyolefins currently available from post-industrial secondary packaging sources from the meat and agriculture sector, but volumes remain minimal and there is a limited ability to scale up.

Structural shortages of material, along with technical limitations such as opacity of material and loss of tensile strength, have led companies to explore other avenues for reaching sustainability commitments such as chemical recycling or bio-based materials.

There are a number of current initiatives looking at the commercial and technical viability of digital watermarking to improve the post-consumer identification and sorting of waste, but Holy Grail 2.0 is among the largest.

In November 2021, ICIS launched a new mixed plastic waste pricing service covering European prices for mixed-polyolefins waste bales, reject refuse-derived fuel (RDF) bales and reject materials recovery facility (MRF) bales. Along with this, the new service covers emerging trends in the chemical and mechanical recycling markets, as well as the burn-for-energy sector. To subscribe to the new pricing service, or for further information, please contact clientsuccess@icis.com.

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