A consortium of 12 European companies and organisations has secured over EUR 1.9m of EU funding to develop processes and quality procedures for the valorisation of recycled plastics for food contact applications. The research is part funded by the European Commission under its FP7 programme. The companies and the EU will commit a total of EUR 2.4m to the “SuperCleanQ” project (www.supercleanq.eu).

The project aims to develop quality control and quality assurance tools and procedures for plastics recycling processes targeted at food contact applications. This will enable SMEs to conform to EC regulations on recycled plastic materials and articles intended to come into contact with foods.

The tools will be applied to a new process for the recycling of coloured and layered PET into food contact applications that cannot be processed by current PET recycling facilities. The project will accelerate 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 in food contact applications.

The SuperCleanQ project will also expand the high value market for recycled plastics and help European SME recyclers reprocess plastic waste that is currently being exported. The objectives of the project are:

• To develop a post-market challenge test for validation of recycled food contact materials with 100% reliability;
• To introduce a post-process validation quality protocol for assuring the efficacy of plastics recycling processes for food contact applications with 100% reliability;
• Development of a process to recycle the 700,000 t/y of currently unrecyclable coloured and layered PET that cannot be processed by existing PET recycling facilities for food contact packaging; and
• In-line monitoring for process quality control to indentify contaminants from oxo-degradable additives, biodegradable plastics, bisphenol A, and non-food contact compliant levels of chemical contamination.

The members of the SuperCleanQ consortium are the British Plastics Federation (www.bpf.co.uk), Italian trade association Assocomaplast (Milan; www.assocomaplast.org), European Plastics Converters (EuPC, Brussels / Belgium; www.plasticsconverters.eu), Italian PET recycler Dentis (Albano Stura; www.dentispet.it), Dutch recycling machinery manufacturer Machinefabriek Otto Schouten (Giessen / The Netherlands; www.ottoschouten.nl), German extrusion machinery component producer Extricom (Lauffen / Germany; www.extricom.de), Schönberg / Germany-based S+S Separation and Sorting Technology (Shrewsbury / UK; www.sesotec.com), rubber and plastics consultancy Smithers Rapra Technology (www.rapra.net), German researcher Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Munich; www.fraunhofer.de), the University of Exeter / UK (www.exeter.ac.uk), the European Committee for Standardisation (Comite Europeen De Normalisation, CEN, Brussels / Belgium; www.cen.eu) and Italian plastics recycler Aliplast (Treviso; www.aliplastspa.com).