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The Circular Plastic Taskforce partners with Digimarc Corporation

MONTREAL — The Circular Plastic Taskforce (CPT) announces a partnership with Digimarc Corporation, creator of Digimarc watermarks that are trying to drive digital identification and detection-based solutions, to test Digimarc® Recycle for optimizing the sortation of flexible plastic packaging in Canada. This project marks the start of Phase II of the CPT, which aims to carry out or support projects to improve the recycling of all plastic packaging within the evolving Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) landscape in Quebec and Canada.

Digimarc Recycle represents a new way to sort and recycle plastic waste. Digital watermarks are applied within the package artwork, no special inks or print process required, and are visible to specialized sorting equipment but imperceptible to consumers. The watermarks, when scanned by machine cameras, connect to a cloud-based database containing unlimited (and extensible) characteristics of the package, such as the manufacturer and specific product, prior use (food versus non-food), additives or the presence of components that are problematic for recycling. As such, it can help facilitate flexible packaging sortation.

“We are thrilled to launch such a forward-looking project and get our Phase II underway”, says the Circular Plastics Taskforce Steering Committee. “The results from our Phase I study show that even if flexible plastic packaging represents a significant portion of plastic packaging used in Quebec and Canada, their recovery rates remain low. One of the reasons is that today’s sortation equipment cannot distinguish between mono-material recyclable packaging and multi-material structures, therefore lowering bale quality. We believe Digimarc Recycle can help solve this challenge.”

The first part of the project consists of testing the ability of specialized optical sorters to adequately capture flexible packaging with digital watermarks in a controlled environment. This test will be performed at the Pellenc R&D Center in Pertuis, France, with various flexible packaging samples manufactured Balcan Innovations, TC Transcontinental (co-founder of the CPT,) and Winpak Ltd.

The project also seeks to confirm the effectiveness of Digimarc Recycle to provide traceability of packaging. Traceability is a prerequisite to produce food-grade recycled resin and will be key to comply with upcoming regulations that will be implemented to accelerate the transition to a circular economy for plastics.