Mission

Creating circular food-grade recycled Polypropylene from post-consumer packaging

Vision

  1. Develop the infrastructure  and systems for recycling PP to food grade in major population centres (in UK).

2. Production of food grade PP for re-use into consumer products including cosmetics and food.

3. Start the recovery of branded PP products for recycling.

4. Establish certification by EFSA and USFDA for the manufacturing processes.

Food grade PP trays

5. Enhance the current recycling and decontamination processes to boost economic efficiency and reduce cost.

 

6. Develop specific grades of rPP for film and sheet extrusion, thermoforming,  blow moulding, and injection moulding

 

 

7. Develop generic processing solutions for the major processing technologies that maximise recycled content and ensure processing stability for monolayer and multilayer structures.

 

 

 

8. Develop new “design for food-grade recycling”  guidelines for brand owners, retailers and convertors.

 

 

Benefits

  1. Sharing of knowledge in the technical advances that can boost the recyclability of PP packaging.

2. Provide a pathway to the circular PP model for brand-owners and retailers via the NextLooPP systems and technologies.

3. Opportunity to trial early production materials in bespoke products

4. Capacity to solve problems encountered in the recycling of PP packaging

Food grade PP trays

Making an Impact Across the Globe

Polypropylene (PP)  is the most dominant polymer in the recycling stream. In Europe alone we produce 10 million tons of PP and only 15% of this is being recycled.

The NEXTLOOPP Roadmap

The roadmap will help keep the consortium in line with industry targets providing 30% average recycled content across the plastic packaging industry by 2025.

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The UK Plastics Pact

Benefit from a Signature Process

PRISM is a new way of rapidly sorting packaging based on intelligent labels with invisible markers that can be detected and sorted using existing high-speed optical sorting systems used in MRFs with minor modifications. This technology uses commercial labelling and decoration methods which are coded with high performing luminescent compounds to sort targeted streams including food-contact plastics, bioplastics, chemical packaging, automotive plastics, black plastics and different grades of one plastic. It will help brand owners to ensure that packaging reaches the recycling loop and boost UK recycling performance.

Join the food grade recycled PP consortium

Subscribe below and a member of the NEXTLOOPP team will be in touch to assist you with your enquiry.

Or alternatively please email: info@nextloopp.com

The NEXTLOOPP Story

Logo

NEXTLOOPP’s mission is to bring transformational R&D to life with a focus on bridging the gap in the circularity of Polypropylene (PP).

Creating and then closing the loop on food-grade PP has taken 8 years of intense research and commercial trials, the result of which is NEXTLOOPP.

The series of unique technological breakthroughs started with cutting edge decontamination technology combining melt-decontamination and solid state decontamination. This was followed by innovative fluorescent markers to ramp up the sorting technology.

NEXTLOOPP is now ready to implement these updated manufacturing processes and become the Holy Grail of recycling.

 

Current challenges facing the industry

When it comes to food grade rPP there are processes that meet EFSA and USFDA requirements but do not have EFSA approval. What is key in this area is separation of prior food use materials.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) requires the infeed material to have previously been used with food. This is due to the fact that up until now, the major barrier to increasing recycled content has been recyclers inability to mechanically differentiate between PP bottles that once contained chemical products from those containing food.

Consortium members

“We have the fundamental technologies needed to complete the loop with food-grade recycled polypropylene and we have a huge task ahead. We can’t ignore the imperatives of tackling waste today. There’s no excuse for waiting.”

Prof. Edward Kosior

Managing Director , Nextek

Reach Us

Please email us with any questions you have. 

UK

info@nextloopp.com