K & R Cycle

What happens with the empty crispec? Does it get burned? Does it end up on a landfill? Or is it recycled? Right now, most of the packaging is not properly designed for recycling. Or the detection at the sorting facility is not able to identify the packaging and separate it precisely. Without proper sorting, the resulting recycling quality is often not high enough in order to be used in high quality second life products. Therefore, much of the flexible packaging ends up in downcycling products or gets burned. So, what has to be done to make packaging ready for circularity? We need to think about the second life and the recycling right at the beginning during the design. It is important that we only use mono materials as well as recyclable adhesives and inks. That's why we at Brutner develop new film types to support mono material packaging. But it's not only that. We also enable our machines to automatically gather and save all relevant information during production and link them with the products. But how does that work? The heart of the system is the R-Cycle database. It connects all players along the supply chain by saving and providing information in a digital product passport. To make the R-Cycle system trustworthy and reliable, we use an open standard from GS1. We embedded a digital watermark in the layout as the connection between the packaging and the R-Cycle database. With this technology, a unique identification of the packaging is possible, and the relevant data can be seen by authorized users, both within an industrial waste sorting facility and also via mobile devices for demonstration or manual waste sorting. The combination of fully recyclable packaging and life-cycle data contained in the digital product passport, allowing precise waste management, is the key to obtaining high-quality recyclates, thus closing the loop and turning the value chain into a value circle. Due to saving all recycling-related information and linking them with packaging, we enable a precise sorting and therefore a high-quality recipe. Stay tuned for the things to come!