17 European organizations form plastic recycling consortium

Seventeen public and private European organizations are combining their scientific and industrial expertise: 

• three industrial partners (Michelin, Mandals, Inditex); 

• two waste management companies (Synergie TLC, Estato); 

• one intelligent sorting small and medium- sized business (Iris); 

• one biological recycling small and medium-sized business (Carbios); 

• one PET plastic processing plant (Kordsa); 

• one product lifecycle analysis company (i-Point); 

• six universities, research and technology organizations (Pprime, Universite de Poitiers, DITF, IFTH, Erasme, HVL); 

• one business cluster (Axelera); and 

• one project management practice (Dynergie). 

The consortium will establish the new processes required for the various steps in the value chain: 

• sorting technologies that make it possible to considerably increase the plastic content of complex waste streams to better process them; 

• a preprocess for recuperated plastic, followed by a recycling process (using an enzyme) that sustainably disintegrates the preprocessed plastic into pure monomers; 

• repolymerization of the resulting plastic monomers to produce like-new plastic; 

• and quality verification of the new products made with the plastic resulting from recycled complex waste.