Innovative recycling projects receive £30m boost from UKRI

UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging (SSPP) Challenge has today announced £30m in funding for 18 groundbreaking collaborative projects that support the achievement of the UK Plastics Pact and have the potential to alter the UK’s relationship with, and management of, plastic packaging.

The SSPP Challenge represents the largest Government investment into sustainable plastic packaging and waste management, and the results of the two funding competitions announced today see five large-scale demonstrator projects and 13 business-led research and development projects benefit from this backing.

Each has demonstrated its value in addressing the need to transform the UK’s retail and packaging supply chains and support the development of more sustainable approaches to plastic packaging use through a range of circular economy business models, novel polymer materials and new recycling technologies.

Large-scale demonstrator projects

The successful large scale Demonstrator projects are focused on three key packaging challenges: reuse and refill, food grade polypropylene recycling, and films and flexible packaging recycling.

CLEANSTREAM technology

Polypropylene (PP) accounts for around 20 per cent of the world's plastic, and is predominantly used to make pots, tubs, and trays for food applications, as well as packaging for personal care and household chemical products. However, as there is no approved food-grade method for the mechanical recycling of PP, the production of PP food packaging currently relies on virgin polymers and the resulting packaging waste is down-cycled into lower value products including automotive parts, pallets, and plant pots.

To meet this challenge, plastics recycling giant Plasgran Ltd – with partners TOMRA Sorting, Maynard & Harris, RPC Containers, and Massmould – have been awarded £4.4m to develop and demonstrate the world’s first economically viable process to separate post-consumer non-food PP packaging and food-contact PP packaging. If successful, the Cleanstream process will allow the food-contact packaging to be mechanically recycled back into food-grade recyclate, significantly increasing the high value recycling of polypropylene in the UK.

Uncaptured Unrecycled Plastics

The Uncaptured Unrecycled Plastics (UP) project will establish and operate a commercial-scale demonstration facility for the recovery, sorting and recycling of post-consumer plastic packaging from mixed waste streams, for example reject material from Materials Recycling Facilities and on-the-go/food retail outlet waste. In these streams, plastic packaging is mixed with other types of packaging (glass, metal, paper, cardboard) and food waste making it unrecyclable in the UK’s current plastic recycling infrastructure.

Bringing together technology expertise from Fiberight Ltd and Impact Recycling Ltd, this demand-led innovation will be used to ensure that the plastic recovered is of a high specification for use in onward mechanical and chemical recycling applications. The project, which has been awarded £5.1m in funding, will be particularly focused on developing a sustainable solution for problematic packaging including films and flexibles.

Impact Recycling Ltd

Also addressing the challenge of post-consumer mixed flexible plastic packaging, Impact Recycling will be using the £4.1m funding to build a commercial demonstrator plant to efficiently separate this difficult waste stream using their novel, disruptive Baffled Oscillation Separation System (BOSS) technology. This wet, density-based separation technology is designed to separate multi-layer and mono-layer flexibles to allow the latter to be recycled into high-quality consumer-grade plastic packaging. At pilot pre-commercial scale, it was demonstrated that the process can separate out monolayer material to 95 per cent purity. The plant is planned to process 25,000 tonnes/year, over double the amount of plastic film collected for recycling in the UK in 2019, and the project will also be demonstrating the benefits of an innovative additive to further enhance the quality and functionality of the resulting recyclate.

Return Refill Repeat

Beauty Kitchen’s major Return Refill Repeat project will deliver a major trial of a pre-filled and returnable packaging scheme for liquid products in partnership with RBC Group, experts in logistics and automated retail, and environmental charity City to Sea. The aim is to create behavioural change among brands, retailers, and consumers by empowering consumers to consider packaging as part of a service. Elements of the project will include new concepts for refill stations, packaging leasing and pre-filled re-usable containers, tracking and analytics, and a smart consumer app.

The whole-system approach being demonstrated by the project, which has been awarded £3m in funding, includes innovative design, advanced technology, detailed processes, integrated business models and supply chains. 

Unpackaged Systems Ltd

Unpackaged is leading a collaborative, cross-sector refillable packaging project including in-store and home delivery that not only combines major supermarkets Morrisons and Waitrose but also home delivery retailer Ocado and logistics experts CHEP, part of Brambles Ltd. Awarded £3.7m, this highly ambitious and groundbreaking multi-retailer, multi-site demonstrator trial aims to tackle the challenge of single-use plastic packaging by creating an innovative system for dispensing and refilling both liquid and dry products into consumers’ own reusable containers either in-store or at home.

Business-led R&D projects

The 13 R&D successful R&D projects cover a range of innovative concepts to improve plastic packaging sustainability and support greater recycling, from novel sorting, cleaning and recycling technologies to RFID and AI technologies to trace reusable food-grade plastic packaging, and new recycling-friendly coatings and barrier materials. They include:

The HiBarFilm2 consortium project, led by Haydale Composite Solutions, is looking to develop a high barrier mono-material polyolefin film for food packaging applications that overcomes the recyclability challenges associated with multi-layer films

• The CircuPlast project, led by Stopford Projects Ltd in partnership with Clean Planet Energy and the University of Birmingham, aims to verify and optimise a novel process (CircuPlast). The process uses super critical water as a green solvent to enable the recycling of hard-to-recycle mixed plastic waste streams (PP, PE, LDPE, HDPE and laminates) into a chemical feedstock to go back into plastics manufacture.
• TIPA Corp UK is leading an 11-partner consortium focused on demonstrating effective means to collect and treat compostable packaging via UK’s existing waste collection and treatment streams. The project will also quantify for the first time the economic and environmental impact in mainstreaming compostable packaging as an alternative to key hard-to-recycle plastics such as flexible packaging, coffee pods and single use service-ware.
• Working in partnership with Gousto and Britvic, Xampla is assessing the use of a plant-based protein to address the rise in plastic sachet use linked to the growing trend for home food delivery and at-home meal kits.
• Nextek will be assessing the commercial viability of the COtooCLEAN process, a disruptive waterless cleaning process based on low-pressure super-critical CO2, to produce food-grade recyclate from post-consumer polyolefin film waste. This highly collaborative project has commercial and technical support from Unilever, Amcor, Viridor, Allied Bakeries, SUPREX, University of Nottingham, and Bangor University.
• Interface Polymers Ltd and Flexipol Ltd will develop 'Recycle Ready' multi-layer barrier films for a wide range of packaging applications that can be recycled into pure plastic waste streams without adversely affecting them.
• Partnering with recycling company Enva and the Biorenewables Development Centre, Sylatech Ltd is developing a new, enhanced recycling technology for plastic films and flexibles called Microwave Assisted Pyrolysis. The high-energy microwaves heat the plastic waste in the absence of oxygen in order to break the chemical bonds producing molecular building blocks (oil) from which new virgin-grade plastic can be made.

Paul Davidson, Challenge Director for UKRI’s SSPP Challenge, commented: “The key to the design and development of this funding competition, along with fostering cross-supply chain collaboration, is to encourage and support ambition at a scale that matches the size of the plastic packaging problem. If successful, these projects have the potential to rewrite the relationship we all have with plastic packaging.”

Flexible packaging design testing programme

The SSPP Challenge is also announcing a major collaboration and co-funding agreement with the Circular Economy for Flexible Packaging (CEFLEX) initiative, a collaboration of over 180 European companies, associations and organisations representing the entire value chain of flexible packaging. CEFLEX aims to make all flexible packaging in Europe circular by 2025 and the £500,000 SSPP funding will support a comprehensive testing programme for CEFLEX’s ‘Designing for a Circular Economy’ guidelines. The testing is designed to improve understanding regarding the sortability and mechanical recyclability of flexible packaging and to generate robust, independent and credible data to update and improve the guidelines.