In this Opinion Piece, NSSN Industrial Futures Lead Dr Don McCallum reports on a collaborative project that brought together university researchers with industry partners to solve a global recycling problem.

New South Wales intends to be at the global forefront of recycling and the circular economy. The pressure on our environment and carbon cycle, and the pointed impact of changes to global recycling, which began in 2017, further exacerbated by the disruption to global supply chains by COVID-19, are all structural features demanding more innovation in our recycling sector.

Many recycling processes are underpinned by better sorting, which fundamentally means better sensing.

The NSW Smart Sensing Network, in collaboration with PEGRAS Asia Pacific, is proud to have formed a team of collaborators, including small and large businesses and several participating universities, in first proposing and then successfully delivering on a great project that was supported by our federal counterparts as part of the Cooperative Research Centre Projects (CRC-P) scheme.

This project solved a global problem of how to effectively remove the glue that adheres a label to a plastic milk bottle. This contamination problem has adversely impacted the industrial washing process of recycling food-grade HDPE for the past 20 years.

Read more in Australian Printer - July 2022 (P. 47), here.

The NSW Smart Sensing Network (NSSN), a consortium of eight leading universities across NSW and the ACT, is a not-for-profit innovation network funded by the NSW Government through the Office of the NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer. The NSSN brings together universities, industry and government to translate world-class research into innovative smart sensing solutions that create value for the economy, environment and society of NSW and beyond.

Partner with us here.

Industry collaboration eliminates label contamination in recycled plastics