Nextloopp completes study on contamination of recycled PP

Nextloopp has completed a study of background contamination in postconsumer recycled polypropylene (PP) packaging for submission to food safety authorities the European Food Safety Authority, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.K. Food Standards Agency. 

Nextloopp says the project is a comprehensive U.K./European study on postconsumer PP packaging to be based on current recycling infrastructure and packaging materials. As such, it will update the knowledge base that has been used for other plastics (high-density polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate) and will shine a new light on the science of risk management and recycling food-grade recycled PP (and potentially other polyolefins). This will enable the project and its members to take a transformational approach to the stringent food-safety requirements around food-contact recycled PP, according to Nextloopp, and further validates the approach of meshing highly effective sorting with powerful decontamination.

Nextloopp’s experts ran 700 headspace analyses by GC-MS, an analytical method that combines the features of gas-chromatography and mass spectrometry, to identify different substances within test samples taken from postconsumer washed PP flakes. These PP flakes were produced from more than 17,500 different pieces of packaging, and the data set was screened using principal component analysis on the chemometric data to identify outliers, along with comparing each peak found against the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) mass spectral library.

These results are poised to enable Nextloopp to help its 47 members navigate the recent changes announced by the European Union Commission regarding the new regulation dealing with recycled plastics in direct food contact, EU 2022/1616.

Having submitted its initial rPP dossier to the U.S. FDA, Nextloopp says it is poised to announce the launch of a new generation of fluorescent markers using renewable, inexpensive and efficient materials. The markers are designed to enable the separation of food-grade PP, according to London-based Nextek Ltd., which launched the Nextloopp project. These technologies also include decontamination stages to ensure compliance with food-grade standards in the EU and the USA.