Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - 22

Plastics industry awards 2019

Best recycled Plastic Product of the year

Make way for monomers

(From left) Shaun Williamson, Mark Dawes, market development manager,
Dmytro Stratiychuk-Dear, research engineer, and Shane Ashby, research
scientist, all from DuPont Teijin Films, and Anne Hitch, citizen & stakeholder
engagement manager at Recoup

T

sponsored by

22

WWW.PRW.COM | November/december 2019

he plastics industry is continuing to
investigate ways to collect and recycle waste to help reduce the amount
of material going to landfill. This includes
more transparent labelling of plastic packaging and ways to deal with a greater variety of plastic materials.
As part of the latter, earlier this year
DuPont Teijin Films announced that it had
made a 'significant step forward' in developing a chemical recycling process for PET
products.
The LuxCR depolymerisation process
results in an end product which can be
used to produce BoPET films. The company is further exploring whether this material can be used to produce rigid products,
such as PET bottles and trays.
It was this level of innovation which
saw DuPont Teijin Films awarded the trophy for the Best Recycled Plastic Product
of the Year at the 2019 Plastics Industry
Awards.
"We were thrilled to learn that our
product had been shortlisted," said Steven Davies, EMEA packaging marketing
manager for DuPont Teijin Films in the
UK.
The development programme for the
recycling process was led by the DuPont
Teijin team in Wilton, Teeside, who worked
in cooperation with the manufacturing
and product stewardship teams.
Asked about whether the LuxCR

could go on to become an integral part
of county's recycling landscape, Davies
replied: "The LuxCR process can be
viewed as an important case study of
how chemical recycling, or monomer recycling, can work alongside mechanical
recycling to boost both the amount of
waste material that can be economically
processed and also the end use applications it can be used in."
The process is of particular interest
when it comes to lower-quality polyester
waste which is difficult or impossible to
economically recycle through traditional
methods.
Davis added that he believes monomer
recycling will receive more investment
over the next five to 10 years, as it starts
to play an increasingly important role in
the UK's circular strategy for plastics.
Rather than replacing mechanical recycling, he further thinks that available synergies should be leveraged to where both
recycling process are brought together in
a one-size-fits-all approach to better deal
with the problem of plastic waste.
As for deciding a final home for the
new trophy, that has yet to be sorted out.
"There may well be a fight between our
production plant and R&D centre! But it
will be getting out of the building with me
as well, as I'll be taking to various exhibitions we have planned over the coming
year," Davis explained with a laugh.
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Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019

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