SuperCleanQ project commences

A 12 strong European consortium has secured a total of €1,916,300 of EU funding for development of processes and quality procedures for the valorisation of recycled plastics for food contact applications. The research is part funded by the European Commission under its Framework 7 programme - more commonly known as FP7.

These companies and the EU will commit a total of €2,392,090 to the project. The project partners include a number of well respected RTD's and SME's, including: Fraunhofer Institute, S+S Separation and Sorting Technology and Extricom GMBH from Germany, Smithers Rapra Technology Ltd, The University of Exeter and the British Plastics Federation from the UK, Dentis SRL, Aliplast SPA and Assocomaplast from Italy, MOS from the Netherlands and EuPC and CEN from Belgium.

The goals of the SuperCleanQ project are maniforld, though primariliy to develop quality control and quality assurance tools and procedures for plastics recycling processes targeted at food contact applications.

The tools will be applied to a new process for the recycling of coloured and layered PET into food contact applications that cannot be processed by current PET recycling facilities. The project results will accelerate the development of new recycling processes for the wider food contact materials market and provide quality assurance for converters and end-users of recycled products applications for food contact thereby overcoming barriers and expanding this high value recycling market.

The SuperCleanQ project will also expand the high value market for recycled plastics and help European SME recyclers reprocess plastic waste that is currently being exported

The objectives can be described as follows:

• A post-market challenge test for validation of recycled food contact materials with 100% reliability
• A post-process validation quality protocol for assuring the efficacy of plastics recycling processes for food contact applications with 100% reliability
• Development of a process to recycle the 700,000 tonnes per year of currently unrecyclable coloured and layered PET that cannot be processed by existing PET recycling facilities for food contact packaging
• In-line monitoring for process quality control to indentify items such as oxo-degradable additives, biodegradable plastics, bis-phenol A, and non-food contact compliant levels of chemical contamination

This project will of course be of interest to the plastics packaging and plastics recycling industries. The BPF is fortunate to have many of the UK's leading plastics packaging producers and indeed plastics recyclers in membership.

More information can be found at www.supercleanq.eu or [email protected]