Deeper insight

Improving sorting is a constant goal among recyclers, and digital watermarks could be one solution that helps material recovery facilities (MRFs) and other processors efficiently recover materials.

Digital watermarks are codes that carry a range of attributes about the consumer goods packaging they are placed on. The goal is that once the packaging enters a MRF or recycling facility, the digital watermark can be detected and decoded using a high-resolution camera on a sorting line.

Beaverton, Oregon-based Digimarc Corp. and AIM – European Brands Association, Brussels, have been trialing this technology in Europe as part of the Digital Watermarks HolyGrail 2.0 pilot project. Digimarc worked with Pellenc ST of France to develop a detection unit for the project, and testing began in October 2021. Tests were performed on about 125,000 pieces of packaging from 260 stock-keeping units (SKUs) at a belt speed of 3 meters, or nearly 10 feet, per second with soiling/crushing and throughput representing industrial operation conditions.

In March, the organizations announced they had completed the semi-industrial trial of this technology, demonstrating an average detection rate of 99 percent, while ejection and purity rates on average were 95 percent. The organizations say the results demonstrate that Digimarc’s technology performs well across all tested categories of plastic packaging in conditions that represent routine industrial operations, even at higher belt speeds and when the packaging has been soiled.

According to Digimarc, the pilot project results indicate that digital watermark technology can lead to better sorting of end-of-life packaging at scale. Later this year, the pilot will enter Phase 3 for final testing.

Plastics Recycling connected with Ken Sickles, executive v ice president and chief product officer at Digimarc, to learn more about how digital watermarks might be applied to improve recyclability as well as takeaways from the HolyGrail 2.0 pilot project.

Plastics Recycling (PR): Could you tell me about Digimarc’s involvement in HolyGrail? What has happened, and what have been some takeaways from the pilot project?

Ken Sickles (KS): It’s been a really comprehensive effort by the industry. In HolyGrail, there are three phases. The first and second phases were really about testing our technologies. The third phase is kind of prepping for rollout. That is intended to be the last phase of HolyGrail.

There was HolyGrail 1.0, which started back in 2014. We participated in that initiative, and it was essentially to see if there was any feasibility to digital watermarks or other technologies. Then, HolyGrail 2.0 was a continuation of the initial HolyGrail, taking those learnings and saying, “OK, how do we expand that? How do we do more extensive testing? And how do we begin to set the framework for implementation once this phase is done?” There’s a lot of pieces besides testing our technology.

Within the HolyGrail, there are different work packages, and they talk about things like how are we going to identify these products? How are we going to share data? What data needs to be captured? A lot of other information is being pulled together by the industry.

From our perspective, when we went into this, we were so confident that we were going to be able to solve this problem, the results were really surprising to us. I think it’s been a really pleasant finding by the industry how effective watermarks actually are.

You can learn a lot more about the Holy Grail initiative by going to www.digitalwatermarks.eu to check out the background [and] see who the founding members are and the leadership team.

Photo courtesy of AIM European Brands Association

PR: What’s the target timeline for HolyGrail 3.0?

KS: I believe they are targeting the September time frame of this year, so about two months since Phase 2 ended. They’re currently giving organizations a little bit of time to come in and participate. So, we’ve been working with some new brand owners and retailers to get their products watermarked as part of the Phase 3 testing.

PR: Aside from pilot projects like HolyGrail, are MRFs and brand owners reaching out to Digimarc about applying digital watermarks as a way to improve the recyclability of their products?

KS: HolyGrail really has been the arena [where] we rolled it out with the sortation machine vendors and facilities. So, [among sortation machine vendors], we’ve not seen adoption outside of that.

But we also know that better recyclability doesn’t start with sortation—it actually ends with sortation. So, we do have customers who are digitizing their products in order to inform their customers about how you can recycle this product, about their commitments to sustainability and what a product might be made of. There is a [recycling initiative] in Spain to educate consumers where our technology is powering the education. So, we’re seeing adoption of our technology to improve recyclability.

The interesting thing that we have found with the conversations with the brand owners around the value of this is, obviously, there’s a ton of value in educating consumers. One of our customers said that all their consumers ever hear about is the waste they put into the ocean. … By digitizing their products on the Digimarc platform, it gives them a medium by which to directly engage with consumers and share information that also provides that valuable first-party data for those brand owners, and they see the same when they think about how their digitized product will be sorted better, they’re actually going to have access to postconsumption data that they’ve never had before. [For instance,] how long has this product been in the market?

This [data] will help them produce better packaging and maybe reduce the amount of chemicals and preservatives in the products. They get all sorts of benefits by having access to that data.

PR: Steadily more states are introducing extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes and legislation. How might digital watermarks help and play into those schemes?

KS: One of the things that we really believe is once you digitize using our digital watermarking technology, it could act as a registry for producer responsibility organizations (PROs). They can use that to make sure that products are properly enrolled in schemes—an easy way to tell on the pack that it’s actually done that—where you reduce some of the burdens around audits and some of the back-office work that those PROs have to do. The more packages that are in the pool, [the more] it’s going to lower costs for everyone who’s contributing to schemes.

I think the other thing we see is an opportunity to benefit the PROs around cross-border commerce, which is starting to happen more and more. So, the PROs would have visibility into what products are ending up in locations and making sure that product is actually registered in that region, contributing ultimately to the EPR scheme for that region, which at the end of the day, we think helps design EPR schemes that are both impactful and fair. So, I think there’s a lot of ways that Digimarc and digitized products will benefit PROs and ultimately result in better EPR schemes.

PR: How do you think digital watermarks might be used in the future to advance packaging recyclability and sorting efforts?

KS: Our goal is to get adoption in as many facilities as we possibly can. We are not charging machine vendors or facilities for our software. We give away the detection as part of our software because we want it to be spread as far and as wide as possible.

I think the near future is [where] we’re going to see that the brand owners are beginning to identify the benefits of product digitization. They’re understanding that products with a digital watermark not only give them better consumer engagement, a better retail experience and counterfeit reduction but also help get packaging sorted better, which ultimately may lead to lower fees and taxes in different areas of the world. So, I think there’s a big, virtuous circle where we’re getting very close to a point where we’re going to see adoption starting to take off.

Ultimately, our goal has been the entire time to make sure more plastics are getting sorted and not making their way to landfills. I think you will see increased quality and recycling. I think the other thing that’s going to happen is we’re really just at the beginning of recyclability and consumer education; those are just two components of sustainability.

The future for Digimarc and digital watermarking as a mechanism will hopefully grow very rapidly.

Ken Sickles is Digimarc Corp.’s executive vice president and chief product officer.