Samples from the Moonshot for Circularity team's plastics library
Trash to Treasure
X’s new collaboration with Dow aims to address one of the biggest challenges facing plastics recycling
X’s Moonshot for Circularity is partnering with Dow to develop a novel approach to dealing with harder-to-recycle plastic materials: films and flexibles.
Films and flexible packaging are typically made by combining multiple layers of thin, pliable plastic. More than one type of plastic is often used: layering different types of plastics, and other materials like metals or paper, to create a highly protective barrier to air and moisture. This type of packaging can protect perishable products like granola, potato chips, and pet food — and is increasingly common because of its ability to keep items fresh and prevent spoilage.
This flexible plastic packaging has lower curbside recycling rates. It is often difficult to identify the different molecular components to properly sort it. As a result, only a small percentage of multi-material, multi-layered films and flexibles currently make it into our recycling streams. Most U.S.-based curbside waste management programs do not accept it in the blue bin, and although an estimated 7 million tons of this material is thrown away in the U.S. annually, less than 5 percent of it ends up recycled. We teamed up with Dow, one of the world’s leading materials science companies, to tackle this challenge together, focusing on ways to improve circularity through identification in sortation.
Our molecular vision system
Last year, Dow acquired Circulus, a leading recycler of plastic waste into post-consumer resin (PCR), to scale its circular products. And now, they’re collaborating with our team to help apply our breakthrough technology in order to identify these materials at their most granular levels, with the goal of ultimately recycling more of these materials into future products.
For the past several years, our team has been using a combination of chemistry, machine learning, AI, and Google’s world-class compute power to build the industry’s first comprehensive database to catalog plastics in packaging. We’ve applied this data to plastic identification and sortation at industrial scale and speed. We’re currently running a pilot at a recycling plant in Oregon, in which our sensor technology can scan thousands of pieces of plastic packaging every minute, instantly identifying their molecular composition, processing the data at milli-second speed, and sorting materials in an industrial capacity.
Plastic samples in the lab
Dow is an ideal partner to help us train our tools to do the same for films and flexibles, which are made up of different percentages of molecular materials that remain harder to measure in today’s modern sorting technologies. As both a producer and recycler of these materials, Dow is providing us with the real-world data we need to tune our molecular models to films and flexibles and test the accuracy of our system for recycling. That data comes from Dow’s work with its customers to design for recyclability at Dow’s Pack Studios. Dow’s experts in chemistry, plastic processing, and materials have already helped us demonstrate first-of-a-kind findings that show our molecular vision tools can accurately identify the components of films and flexibles and even predict the material composition percentages in each piece of packaging.
We’re encouraged by this proof of concept, and in the coming months, we’ll be continuing our work with Dow to further explore the potential of molecular vision to help address more film and flexible recycling challenges. We aim to enhance recycling systems to better identify, sort, and recycle materials into new packaging products.
Dow sees promise in how these molecular-level insights can make it easier and more efficient to accurately characterize waste — and unlock more potential feedstocks for mechanical and advanced recycling through improved sorting.
We have a long way to go, but we are optimistic about these early results. We look forward to continuing this pursuit, and are looking for other collaborators to join us! If you work in waste collection, plastic conversion, consumer packaged goods, or regulatory compliance and are interested in helping to unlock the potential of film and flexible recycling, please get in touch.