Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever (London / UK and Rotterdam / The Netherlands; www.unilever.com) has unveiled technology that will recycle the hundreds of billions of plastic sachets that are discarded every year. The “CreaSolv” process, which Unilever said was inspired by a method used to recycle televisions, has been developed with the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging (Munich / Germany; www.ivv.fraunhofer.de).

The technology is based on the procedure to separate brominated flame retardants from plastics in waste electrical and electronic equipment. During the process, the plastic is recovered from the sachet and used again to create new sachets for Unilever products.

While single-use sachets are very resource-efficient, allowing low-income consumers to buy small amounts of products they would otherwise be unable to afford, billions of these sachets end up in landfill or as litter because there is no viable recycling solution.

David Blanchard, Unilever’s chief R&D officer, commented: “There is a clear economic case for delivering this. We know that globally USD 80 - 120 bn is lost to the economy through failing to properly recycle plastics each year. Finding a solution represents a huge opportunity. We believe that our commitment to making 100% of our packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable will support the long-term growth of our business.” He added that Unilever intends to make the technology open source and hopes to scale it up with industry partners so that others, including competitors, can use it.

The company will open a pilot plant later this year at an undisclosed site in Indonesia to test the technology’s long-term commercial viability. “With this innovative pilot plant we can, for the first time ever, recycle high-value polymers from dirty, post-consumer, multi-layer sachets. Our calculations indicate that we are able to recover six kilos of pure polymers with the same energy effort as the production of one kilo of virgin polymer,” said Andreas Mäurer, department head of plastic recycling at the Fraunhofer Institute. Unilever said Indonesia is a critical country in which to tackle waste as it produces 64m t of waste every year, with 1.3m t ending up in the ocean.

In a bid to tackle the industry-wide issue of waste sachets, the consumer goods group is also looking to set up collection schemes to channel the sachets to be recycled. Unilever said it is currently testing this by working with local waste banks, governments and retailers, and will look to empower waste pickers, integrate them into the mainstream economy and provide a potential long-term income, generating wider growth in the economy.

Unilever has pledged to ensure all of its plastic packaging is fully reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025 (see Plasteurope.com of 26.01.2017).