The three-year “SuperCleanQ” project (www.supercleanq.eu) ended on 31 October 2014. The project, which was part-funded by the European Commission’s seventh framework programme, began in November 2011 – see Plasteurope.com of 12.01.2012 – and has successfully achieved its objectives to develop quality control and quality assurance tools and procedures for plastics recycling processing targeted at food contact applications, the project consortium members said.

One of the main successes of the project is the development of a Comité Européen De Normalisation (CEN) technical specification for recycled, food grade PET which is due to be published in early 2015. This will provide governing bodies, regulators and industry with the capability to determine the purity of these products in a cost-effective and accurate manner. The project has carried out a number of other developments including an extruder-based decontamination system to purify contaminated post-consumer PET using a degassing/filter system, in-line monitoring employing near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) to detect biodegradable contaminants in the process lines of food grade PET and HDPE, and the evaluation of different spectroscopic sorting technologies for black, highly coloured and multilayer PET.

The consortium said the project results will assist in the development of new recycling processes for the wider food contact materials market and provide quality assurance for converters and end-users of recycled products for food contact applications. Other achievements, including the in-line monitoring system, have the potential to be exploited by the general plastics recycling sector.