PolyChrome | Polychrome can remove virtually all colours and additives from waste plastic. This will disrupt the plastic recycling industry by enabling manufacturers to tap new sources of recyclate.

Original description

IPP have developed a disruptive new technology (PolyChrome) which can remove all pigments and additives from mixed waste Polyethylene (PE) and Polypropylene (PP) films and rigids, the two most common plastics in use, and allow the properties of the end product to be ‘tuned’ to the end-application through selective fractionation of the polymer molecular weights. This is a unique process in which a mixed waste plastic with a range of properties can fractioned into more useful recycled PE and PP grades. This will be an entirely new way to extract value from recyclate and enable it to be used in vastly more application: food packaging, films, rotomoulding, injection moulding, 3D printing. In doing this project to optimise and pilot Polychrome, recycled plastics will be more valuable and relevant to end market applications making their use far wide spread and increasing the recyclate moving back into packaging and other high end applications.

Polychrome uses solvents to dissolve the recyclate, before filtering to remove any pigments, additives and chemical contamination. This is then coupled with IPP’s proprietary method to selectively precipitating certain Molecular weights in the allowing the output to be tailored for various end-uses. The end product is a clear virgin-like pellet suitable for food grade use. The solvents (green solvents which are not toxic to the environment) used in Polychrome can be reused over 100 times, allowing the process to be cost-effective and are standard within the plastics industry.

Status

CLOSED

Url

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101010875

Call topic

H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2020-4

Update Date

27-10-2022