UKRI’s Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging (SSPP) Challenge attended this year’s RWM & Letsrecycle Live (Stand R-P160) sharing news about a planned new funding competition to drive sustainability in plastic packaging and showcasing some of their exciting current research and innovation projects.
Visitors to the stand got the lowdown on a forthcoming Design Challenge for collection containment solutions for household plastic films and flexibles and found out more about the innovation support available from KTN.
A £60 million five-year programme, the SSPP Challenge is working to make plastic packaging fit for a sustainable future. It is the largest and most ambitious UK government investment to date in sustainable plastics research and innovation, and is focused on stimulating a step change in the UK’s ability to reduce, reuse and recycle plastic packaging.
“SSPP’s aim is to encourage and support ambitious and ground-breaking research and innovation at a scale that matches the size of the plastic packaging problem. If successful, the projects we are funding have the potential to help rewrite our relationship with plastic packaging,” explains Challenge Director Paul Davidson.
The funded projects showcased on the RWM stand demonstrated the breadth of SSPP’s portfolio and the range of specific challenges being addressed, from films and flexibles and mixed plastics recycling to the potential future role of compostables, optimised plastics collection and behaviour change, and better data.
FlexCollect: SSPP is one of the co-funders of the Flexible Plastic Fund FlexCollect project, a consortium of leading organisations delivering the UK’s biggest ever pilot scheme to support the kerbside collection and recycling of flexible plastic packaging.
Fiberight Ltd: the Swansea-based company is leading the Uncaptured Unrecycled Plastics project. One of SSPP’s large-scale demonstrator projects, the aim is to scale up a novel process for the sorting and recycling of plastic packaging from mixed waste streams e.g. MRF reject material.
Impact Recycling: another large-scale demonstrator, this project is scaling up a novel wet density-based separation technology to separate multi- and mono-layer flexibles, enabling mono-layer material to be recycled back into high quality recyclate for packaging applications.
The Compostable Coalition: led by TIPA Corp Ltd, this project is exploring the opportunities to effectively capture and process compostable packaging, including behaviour change interventions and infrastructure considerations.
The University of Manchester: The collaborative ‘One Bin to Rule Them All’ project is developing a hierarchical approach to collecting and sorting plastic packaging that retains polymers in their highest value condition for reuse, mechanical recycling and chemical recycling to unlock material, social and economic value.
OPRL/ Dsposal/Open Data Manchester: This consortium is developing an Open Data Standard and a Plastic Packaging Portal to improve data quality and consistency and support the current and future reporting needs of the plastic packaging value chain.
Representatives from each of the projects, as well as the SSPP and KTN team, will be on Stand R-P160 and SSPP is also delivering a conference session on Films & Flexibles at 14.30 on Day 1 in the Circular Economy Theatre.
About UKRI’s Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge
UKRI’s Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge aims to establish the UK as a leading innovator in smart and sustainable plastic packaging, driving cleaner growth across the supply chain, and delivering a significant reduction in plastic waste entering the environment by 2025. The Challenge brings together academia, the full plastic packaging value chain and other key stakeholders, and supports the delivery of the 2025 UK Plastics Pact targets. More information can be found here.
