Digimarc Accelerates the Global Fight Against Plastic Pollution
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“After another year plagued with a lot of talk but little action in the fight to end plastic pollution, we are expanding our reach across stakeholders and geographies to encourage partners in
The Plastic Recycling Outlook
In
One of the main reasons the world struggles to recycle plastic is due to the number of plastic variants that are created by industry and the limits of the optical sorting technology that exists at recycling facilities. Plastic packaging spans a huge range of types – from food- or skin-contact-grade to industrial-use plastics – and often contains multiple materials and layers, further compounding the challenges of sorting today. Current sorting technology can only identify, at a high level, some of the materials in each item, but it cannot identify the grade or complex composition of much of the material it works to sort. This means that it cannot sort based on specifications that would allow plastics to retain the value required to become truly circular – for example, determining if a plastic is food-grade. This disincentivizes producers to purchase and use recycled plastic as they are unable to acquire the plastic varieties and specifications they need.
Digimarc Recycle changes this dynamic by linking covert digital watermarks applied to plastic packaging to product information, including packaging composition, food or non-food grade plastic, product variant, brand, SKU, and more. Deploying digital watermarking, instead of solely relying on optical sortation, helps to create the variety, volume, and quality of recycled plastics needed for a viable circular economy to flourish.
Digimarc Recycle powers precise granular sortation of plastics, thereby increasing the opportunity for producers to purchase and repurpose higher quality recycled plastic that can compete on a level playing field with virgin materials. Digimarc’s digital watermarking technology makes this possible by identifying plastic packaging deterministically to any desired level of granularity including brand, SKU, SKU-variant, batch/lot, or even serialized item, none of which can be accomplished with current optical sorting technology or other proposed next-generation technologies. The application of Digimarc Recycle helps disincentivize the continued use of virgin plastics by producers and makes extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes a more viable option to tackle the growing problem of plastic pollution.
“If we want producers to buy recyclate instead of continuing to use virgin plastic, we must improve the quality of plastic output at today’s recycling facilities and offer a real opportunity for closed-loop recycling. This is where
Learn more about Digimarc Recycle at Digimarc.com or contact us at product@digimarc.com.
About
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Plastics: Material-specific data | US EPA. (n.d.). |
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Sullivan, L. (2022, |
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Budryk, Z. (2022) US only recycled 5 percent of plastic waste in 2021: Greenpeace report, The Hill. |
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Herweg, 0., Popa, D. (2023, |
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Media Contacts:
509-939-1137
PR@digimarc.com
720-422-5258
anneka@thegrovepartners.com
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