Plastics and plastic waste have become a major concern for our society. Since the BBC's Blue Planet programme, the public, media, celebrities, governments, NGOs and businesses have all turned the spotlight on to what happens to the plastics we all use in our daily lives. Despite these high levels of concern UK recycling levels for plastics remain low overall, with the majority being landfilled or incinerated. For some types of plastic, such as flexible packaging, very little of this material is collected, sorted and recycled. In parallel there is increasing demand for recycled plastics, with product manufacturers actively searching for UK supplies of suitable recycled plastics to replace virgin polymer and costly imports.

The WaPiC (Waste Plastics in Chemical recycling) project, delivered by Fiberight, will assess and demonstrate a solution to the plastic problem. Fiberight will amalgamate, sort, and test purification strategies for producing in-demand clean plastic recyclable streams from mixed-waste; helping the UK to increase resource recovery within the net-zero ambition.

Although a necessity exists to increase mechanical recycling of plastics, this pathway has limitations due to; off-take market size, narrow range of end-use applications for the recyclate, regulatory hurdles, technical re-manufacturing challenges and public acceptance of waste-derived materials in certain products.

WaPiC will therefore explore the recovery of plastics from mixed-waste streams as a suitable input for chemical recycling and as a complementary technology to mechanical recycling processes. This strategy will enable the recovery and recycling of a larger portion of plastics from residual waste.

Chemical recycling is being seen by many in the value-chain as a way of overcoming the challenges associated with mechanical recycling. Key benefits are: the ability to generate virgin-equivalent recycled plastics for use in a wide range of end-use applications including food contact packaging; and recycling of a wider range of plastic materials (flexible and rigid plastics), for value-added applications.