Making more plastics recyclable
Until now, it has merely been the wish of many plastics recyclers: that a product’s recyclability be taken into account right from the design stage. A new project is now working towards making this wish a reality.
The DIMOP project is developing digital tools that make it easy to assess and improve the recyclability of plastic products, for example by reducing the number of material components. (Image: Jan Werner / SKZ Würzburg)
Whether it is multi-layer food packaging, the sheathing of power cables or a toothbrush: many plastic products cannot be recycled. This is the case, for example, when products consist of several materials that cannot be separated from one another, or cannot be separated effectively enough.
Only 16 per cent of the plastic waste generated in Germany is actually recycled here. This figure is taken from the 2019 Plastic Atlas, published by the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. According to the report, the lion’s share of plastic waste is ‘recovered for energy’ in waste-to-energy plants or used as a substitute fuel.
Development and recycling have so far been separate worlds
Making more plastics recyclable: the Chair of Business Administration and Business Informatics at Julius Maximilian University (JMU) Würzburg, the SKZ Plastics Centre and two partners from the Bavarian plastics industry have been working on this since July 2019. Their project is funded by the Bavarian State Ministry for the Environment and Consumer Protection.
The partners aim to improve the recyclability of plastics by reducing the number of material components. “We’re starting with product design, because that’s where the issue of recyclability has so far played hardly any role,” says Dr Jan Werner from the SKZ, an institute of the Zuse Association. “Developers and recyclers operate in completely separate worlds; there is absolutely no exchange of information.” As a result, materials are often selected during the design phase that cause significant problems during recycling.
Digital platform provides information on materials
The project now aims to bring these two worlds into contact with one another. In future, this will be facilitated by a software platform on which information about the circularity of various plastics and material combinations can be accessed. This will enable developers to weigh up criteria such as functionality, resource efficiency and recyclability against one another and make a correspondingly improved choice of materials.
A JMU team led by Norman Pytel and Professor Axel Winkelmann is responsible for designing the platform. “Our aim is to provide product development teams with digital tools that assist in decision-making during the material selection process – always with the goal of increasing the circularity of plastic products,” says PhD student Pytel.
Part of a Bavarian project consortium for greater resource efficiency
The project is called “Digital multi-criteria material selection for optimised circularity of plastic products – DIMOP”. It is funded by the Free State of Bavaria as part of the “Project Consortium for Greater Resource Efficiency in the Bavarian Economy, particularly for SMEs and the skilled trades – ForCYCLE II”. The project began in July 2019 and will run for three years.