Nextloopp, the 47-strong project to create food-grade mechanically recycled polypropylene (rPP) from post-consumer packaging waste, has welcomed L’Oreal as its newest member.
L’Oreal, said Delphine Trillat, who is the Materials Science Domain leader at the company said that the global beauty leader had been working for many years to develop packaging made from high quality post-consumer recycled polymers. The company views the Nextloopp project as developing a ‘promising technology for the years to come’.
The Nextloopp project is an initiative of Edward Kosior, founder and CEO of UK-based Nextek Ltd, who launched the project in October 2020. He called L’Oreal ‘the ideal participant to trial our high purity recycled polypropylene resins’.
“We look forward to closing the PP loop with them,” he said.
Nextloopp recently hit the headlines with the outstanding results of their innovative tracer-based sorting trials. Production trials of food-grade compliant rPP making over 60 different products from the project’s four grades of PPristine food compliant and INRT rPP grade resins recently commenced. The INRT rPP grade was developed specifically for packaging that requires no odour and no migration challenges.
The recycling process is based on a separation step, in which food-grade PP is sorted out from the rest of the waste and then decontaminated to ensure compliance with food-grade standards in the UK, EU and the USA. The technology is able to identify and sort any number of pack variants from shower gel bottles to yoghurt pots in any plastic type.