An app that was developed by the Reifenhäuser Group and presented by the extrusion specialists in October 2019 will now be further scaled and internationalised by spacepilots, a Cologne-based digital agency, the company has announced.
Called cheqpacs, the app provides a tool for consumers to find out more about the packaging of the products they buy.
After downloading the app, consumers simply scan the barcode on the packaging for information about its sustainability value in terms of resource efficiency, recyclability and recyclate content .
It has already garnered a considerable following in Germany.
As a manufacturer of machinery and plants, it was the first time the Reifenhäuser Group had interacted directly with end consumers. The company gained a great deal of valuable information from the experience, especially about what consumers and retailers really want, said Bernd Reifenhäuser, CEO of the Reifenhäuser Group. As specialists in plastics processing the company aims to make the best packaging solutions available to all. However, the time has come for the tool to be further developed outside the plastics industry, and ‘spacepilots can do this better’, he explained.
The focus of the Reifenhäuser Group is currently on developing, together with three other plastics machinery manufacturers and the Institute for Plastics Processing at RWTH Aachen University, the R-Cycle initiative to market maturity.
R-Cycle is an open standard for stakeholders of all industries involved in the life cycle of plastic packaging. It enables high-quality plastics recycling by identifying and separating out recyclable packaging, yielding pure recycling fractions which can be used to produce high-quality products.
“With the joint project R-Cycle, we are instead concentrating on developing the standard for a functioning circular economy in the plastics industry together with other companies”.
Spacepilots plans to further expand and develop the cheqpacs app. The tool has great potential, thinks Christoph Bresler, CEO of spacepilots, especially in these times of increasing environmental awareness.
“We want to make the results of the worldwide sustainability initiatives transparent and understandable for every user. The app can help us do this because it touches a nerve in our society,” said Bresler.