TotalEnergies joins food-contact recycled PP initiative

French company TotalEnergies, which develops, produces and commercializes polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene polymers, their recycled equivalents and biopolymers, has joined NextLoopp, an initiative comprised of companies from the plastics value chain that aims to create polypropylene that is suitable for food-grade packaging applications using advanced mechanical recycling.

London-based Nextek Ltd., a global sustainability and technology consultancy, launched the initiative in October 2020.

The project deploys technology designed to efficiently and cost-effectively sort food-grade polypropylene (PP) from postconsumer material and then decontaminate the PP to comply with food-grade standards. NextLoopp recently completed a study on background contamination of postconsumer PP packaging for its submissions to the relevant food safety authorities in Europe, the United States and the United Kingdom.

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.

NextLoopp says the results from the study are poised to enable Nextloopp to help its 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.

TotalEnergies says it is committed to developing a circular economy for plastics and to meeting growing customer demand for high-quality recycled polymers. In that context, the company will leverage this technological partnership to accelerate the feasibility review of advanced mechanical recycling projects targeting food-contact packaging and further expand its recently launched RE:use polymers range, which contains mechanically recycled raw materials.

“We are delighted to join and support the NextLoopp project, alongside other major industry players,” Nathalie Brunelle, senior vice president of Polymers at TotalEnergies, says in a news release about joining the initiative. “This initiative will allow us to go one step further in developing technologies to produce food-grade recycled material from advanced mechanical recycling and broaden our options for projects that contribute to our ambition to produce 30 percent circular polymers by 2030.”

Professor Edward Kosior, founder and CEO of Nextek Ltd. and NextLoopp adds, “The whole of the NextLoopp project is strengthened by TotalEnergies’ adding to the program their extensive technical capabilities in creating circular solutions for PP resins. They contribute to the growing body of expertise in controlling the properties and formulation of their range of both virgin and recycled PP for a myriad of applications.”