CIMPA: a circular multilayer plastic approach for value retention of end-life multilayer films
You may have seen in news that the committee set up by the United Nations Environment Programme in 2022 has finally failed to sign a Plastic Pollution Treaty by the end of 2024. Where political forces are unarmed, it is also a duty from the whole value chain to find solutions for the future – in particular in the packaging industry.
The CIMPA European project (https://cimpa-h2020.eu/) strives for contributing to plastic pollution restraint. Started in 2021, CIMPA’s project, with its 13 partners from 5 countries, including Benkei, was aimed to develop adequate technologies to enable multilayer films recycling without increasing environmental impact of the whole value chain.
Benkei’s contribution
The project is coordinated by Céline Chevallier at IPC and supported by Manon Perrodin at Benkei. In addition, Nadège Boccon has a pivotal role as Exploitation Manager support.
Through this activity, Benkei has been, with Paprec, the main interlocutor of all partners to help them identifying the Key Exploitable Results (KER) of the project and define the technology integration roadmap. Once KER have been identified, Benkei has organised benchmark analyses to confront results to concurrent ones – confirming the interest of CIMPA’s technologies. Besides, a market test has been conducted, which results have proven the possibility to implement circular business models to ensure long term viability of the technologies developed.
Three circular driven business models have been introduced to respondents, with quantified data extracted from the work done by IPC on Life Cycle Cost (Available Public Deliverable D6.5).
While looking at trends by value chain position (e.g., Packaging, Recycling, Manufacturing), it appears that naturally, each sector fosters the business model the closest to its activity – and Recyclers are ready to integrate up or downstream processes to implement the “Transformer” model.
Finally, Benkei has organised creativity sessions involving all partners of the project, and different domains have been identified to foster replicability of results in industries such as agribusiness, materials for electrical and electronic equipment, and medical activities.
CIMPA’s results
Among plastic packaging wastes, there are some which are considered as unavoidable without generating other detrimental impacts on environment. Indeed, up to now, the industry has not found how to protect food and limit food waste without barriers brought by multilayer plastic packaging. There is therefore a growing ambition to increase plastic circularity while retaining the social and economic benefits derived from plastic products, among them multilayer ones.
This ambition has been confirmed by the recent adoption in 2024 by the European Parliament of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), introducing recycling targets, per unit and at scale, to enforce the transition to circularity (Access to the text on EUR-Lex.europa.eu here).
Contributing to this ambition, CIMPA has finally delivered following results:
- An innovative compositional sorting technology combining NIR (Near InfraRed) and digital watermarking, with an efficiency achieved up to 97% (Available White Paper)
- Mechanical and physical recycling technologies, with promising results showing for instance, satisfactory Water Transmission Rate after mechanical recycling and kg-scale feasibility of safe physical recycling (Available Public Deliverable D3.5 and D4.6)
- An advance ScCO2-based decontamination process, to ensure possibility to reuse recycled material in high value application such as food packaging
- A smart upgrading process to ensure industrial use of recycled materials – results being summarized in a Plastics Recycling World article (here).
In parallel, the project has built knowledge on Life Cycle Analysis approach in order to introduce recyclates quality as a factor – with two pending publications. It has also supported further development of an open source model to simulate migrations of organic molecules through multilayers – crucial limitation for the reuse of plastic for food packaging (Replay of a Webinar introducing the model available here).
More information about CIMPA: https://cimpa-h2020.eu – https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101003864
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cimpa-project/
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N°101003864.
The project is supported by Nadège Boccon and Manon Perrodin at Benkei.
