ReVise-UP

Post-consumer plastic packaging is the largest plastic stream in Germany. Post-consumer plastic recycling to date has been limited by a considerable lack of transparency along the entire value chain.

In the ReVise concept phase, however, it was possible to demonstrate that plastic streams can be characterised using sensor technology. The ReVise implementation phase will now investigate the extent to which sensor-based material flow monitoring can be successfully implemented on an industrial scale and contribute to greater transparency in plastics recycling. The aim is to improve existing plastics recycling through three key effects:

• Incentives: Data transparency should create positive incentives for better collection and product qualities, which should subsequently lead to an improvement in recyclate qualities and an increase in the use of recyclates.
• Adaptive process parameterisation: The material flow information obtained will be used to adapt technical sorting, treatment and plastics processing procedures to fluctuating material flow properties, which should lead to an increase in the efficiency of the existing technical infrastructure with little additional effort.
• Ecological and economic optimisation of the overall chain: The improved data situation will make it possible to evaluate across the value chain at which point a targeted additional use of technology creates the greatest ecological and economic added value and to address these improvement options in a targeted manner.

The Wuppertal Institute will support the work, particularly in the development of optimisation paths and their evaluation.

The project is being funded as part of the "Ressourceneffiziente Kreislaufwirtschaft – Kunststoffrecyclingtechnologien (KuRT)" ("Resource-efficient circular economy – plastics recycling technologies") funding programme. "KuRT" is part of the BMBF research concept "Ressourceneffiziente Kreislaufwirtschaft" (Resource-efficient circular economy) and is aimed at the high-quality recycling of plastics.