Ecosurety funded innovation to facilitate flexible plastics recycling ready for commercial scale

Impact Recycling have successfully developed their BOSS-2D technology to accurately separate mono-layer and multi-layer post-consumer flexible plastic film.

The low-impact BOSS process relies on baffled oscillation to create eddy currents in water that can separate floating particles of material according to their density, enabling them to be accurately and automatically separated.

The process has succeeded in separating mono-layer polyolefin films from batches of mixed post-consumer flexible plastic film, to purities of up to 95+% and at a rate of two tonnes per hour.

A significant barrier to increasing the recycling of post-consumer flexible plastic waste is that existing recycling technologies are unable to accurately identify and separate mono-layer and multi-layer flexible plastic films which visually look the same, meaning they cannot be effectively recycled into high value film that can be used again.

Flexible plastic packaging represents a quarter of all UK consumer plastic packaging, but according to the UK Plastics Pact 2019/20 annual report only 6% is currently recycled.

This issue has become increasingly urgent for the producers of flexible plastics with upcoming packaging EPR measures, including a Plastic Packaging Tax on plastic that contains less than 30% recycled content due to be introduced in April 2022, set to significantly increase their responsibility for the material they place onto the market.

Funded by the Ecosurety Exploration Fund

The BOSS-2D project by Newcastle-based Impact Recycling was fully funded via the first round of the Ecosurety Exploration Fund and kicked off in December 2020. Within only nine months, the project completed all planned objectives and concluded with a successfully commissioned, large-scale prototype that has been rigorously trialled using real-world batches of post-consumer mixed flexible plastic waste.