Following the announcement two days ago that the digital watermarks initiative Holy Grail 2.0 has entered the final phase of R&D trials, Digimarc Corporation today confirmed that the HolyGrail initiative leadership team has selected France as the first country to implement Digimarc’s technology on a nation-wide basis.
The aim is to establish a test market in the country in 2024. The initiative, in which, to date, seven companies have indicated they will be participating, will see the rollout of the technology in the French market, with a nationwide deployment of digital watermark sorting solutions. Citeo, one the French EPR organisations, is also supporting the initiative.
Digimarc Recycle takes the sorting and recycling of plastic waste to a new level. It overcomes the limitations of today's optical sorting technologies by linking covert digital watermarks with an extensible cloud-based repository of product attributes (such as brand, SKU, product variant, packaging composition, food/non-food/cosmetics use, etc.). The result is a radical improvement in the quality and quantity of recyclate, which in turn opens the door to new end markets for post-consumer recyclate that do not exist today.
Three brand owners, Henkel, L’Oréal and P&G, are taking part in the project. Over the coming months, they will be adding digital watermarks to a significant part of their HDPE rigid packaging portfolios for the French market. Once discarded, the packaging enhanced with the digital watermarks will be collected with the rest of the curbside collected post-consumer waste and taken to Veolia’s PlastiLoop Brenouille facility (FR). Here, the packaging will undergo sorting by the watermark detection unit developed by Pellenc ST and Digimarc, which will allow the enhanced non-food HDPE stream to be separated from the non-enhanced packaging waste.
In addition to improved sortation, the technology also enables valuable insights and information to be gained about, for example, the size, scope and content of the waste stream, making it possible, among others, to better tailor EPR schemes to real-world situations and provide a host of other benefits.
“Digimarc applauds the vision and action of the France team and its pioneering member organisations, including P&G, L’Oreal, Henkel, Veolia, CITEO, and Pellenc ST,” said Riley McCormack, Digimarc President & CEO. “Moreover, we are committed to working alongside this group to expand the rollout to other facility operators, brands and retailers in France, because when the only thing that stands in the way of progress is inertia, true leadership is defined by those who take action.”
The initiative will serve as a bridge between the R&D phase and commercial rollout. If successful, this test market will provide further evidence of the readiness of the HolyGrail 2.0 technology not only from a technical, but also from an economic perspective, paving the way for market adoption at scale.
The 2030 deadline – when 100% of plastic packaging must be reusable, easily recyclable, or compostable – is looming, and with it, the deadlines for compliance with the mandatory EU-wide targets for plastic recycled content in packaging. Innovative technologies like this will enable these obligations to be met.
“We are excited to work with the stakeholders in the French market and are committed to helping expand this initiative in Europe,” McCormack concluded. “Digimarc is also engaged with other groups, across multiple continents, to open new Digimarc Recycle markets. The technology to effect real change exists today, and delayed adoption leads to permanent and irreversible damage to our planet. The time to act is now.”