Global packaging solutions company Sidel announced this month it would be working toward making the circular economy a reality by joining R-Cycle.
R-Cycle is an open tracing standard for sustainable plastic packaging designing “product passports” to speed the recycling of plastic packaging globally. The company uses an open tracing standard to gather information about the recycling-related properties of packaging, then stores the details on a common data platform, allowing the information to be accessed and recorded by any production machinery along the value chain. The passports ultimately enable waste-sorting lines to identify recyclable packaging to create recycling-friendly and pure materials for reprocessing into a variety of plastic products.
“Sidel recently joined R-Cycle because we want to continue playing a key role in bringing the circular economy to life,” Francesca Bellucci, Sidel’s sustainability portfolio director, product innovation and marketing, said. “Having a global standard that connects partners from around the world across the plastic packaging lifecycle to record and retrieve all relevant packaging properties will hugely benefit product sustainability. It will improve manufacturing processes as well as the quality of recyclates, resulting in the implementation of a genuinely circular economy.”
Sidel currently works with customers to advance PET adoption and make more recyclable packaging. Working together, Sidel and R-Cycle hope to reduce barriers to effective plastics recycling. Presently, recyclable plastic packaging can’t be separated precisely enough from waste streams to achieve high-quality recycling, which contributes to low recycling rates of about 9 percent.
“It is great to see how our community is constantly growing with forward-looking partners from the packaging industry who are uniting their high innovative strength under the R-Cycle flag,” Dr. Benedikt Brenken, director at R-Cycle, said. “Sidel is contributing important impetus here and its clear commitment to a functioning circular economy, which will move us forward together.”