Pilot plant in Indonesia will apply CreaSolv approach for recovering plastic from waste
London Unilever has unveiled new technology for recycling sachet waste: the CreaSolv Process, developed with the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV in Germany and inspired by an innovation used to recycle TV sets.
Billions of single-use sachets are sold every year, particularly in developing and emerging markets. Sachets are extremely resource efficient and allow low-income consumers to buy small amounts of products that would otherwise be unaffordable to them. But without a viable recycling solution, sachet packaging ends up in landfill or as litter. As part of its Sustainable Living Plan, Unilever has long been committed to finding an alternative to throwing sachets away.
CreaSolv has been adapted from a method used to separate brominated flame retardants from waste electrical and electronic equipment polymers. The plastic is recovered from the sachet and used to create new sachets for Unilever products, creating a full circular economy approach.
“Billions of sachets are used once and just thrown away, all over the world, ending up in landfill or in our waterways and oceans,” said David Blanchard, chief R&D officer.
“At the start of this year we made a commitment to help solve this problem, developing new recycling technologies. We intend to make this tech open source and would hope to scale the technology with industry partners, so others including our competitors can use it.”
Unilever will open a pilot plant in Indonesia later this year to test the long-term commercial viability of the technology. Indonesia is a critical country in which to tackle waste as it produce 64m tonnes every year, of which 1.3m tonnes ends up in the ocean.