PACKAGING/PALLETISING PETplanet Insider Vol. 23 No. 03/22 www.petpla.net 27 standards, currently leads to barriers to their industrial use. Regulatory restrictions can also often not be met. Finally, there is a lack of information along the value chain of plastic products to guarantee optimisations in an ecologically sustainable way. The IKV is pursuing a cross-value-added approach to establish digital solutions for the sustainable use of recycled materials. In the BMBF joint research project “PlasticBond”, prototype concepts are being developed together with a broad-based research and industry consortium, which take product and process properties into account at every stage of the life cycle and provide them as information along the lines of the material passport introduced by the “Platform Industry 4.0”. Use cases where the digital passport can be a benefit are many and varied. At the meta-level, for example, the focus is on efficient recyclate processing, holistic optimisation of ecological sustainability (e.g. CO2 footprint of packaging) and fulfilment of extended producer responsibility (EPR). The research project also ties in with the crosscompany initiative “R-Cycle” founded by the Reifenhäuser company for the traceability of plastic packaging, in which the IKV is one of the consortium members. The effects of the use of different recyclate qualities and varying recyclate proportions on plastics processing are also taken into account. However, the focus here is less on increasing individual recyclate qualities or optimising processing, but rather on standardising secondary raw material flows. Recyclates are to be used in a targeted manner depending on their classification and thus increasingly integrate the political goals into practice in the sense of a “circular economy”. www.ikv-aachen.de Figure 2: Recyclable barrier packaging for the chemical industry (image: IonKraft)
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