The Plastics Recycler Luxus, Nordic processor Polykemi and plastics manufacturer One51 have secured a total of £1.29m in investment from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme for a project to sort black plastic waste.

The Horizon 2020 programme “promises more breakthroughs, discoveries and world-firsts by taking great ideas from the lab to the market”.

The funding will contribute towards a two-year project aimed at replacing carbon black and many other pigments with near-infrared (NIR) detectable alternatives.

Currently black plastic packaging (usually in the form of ready meal trays) is coloured using carbon black pigments, which do not enable the pack to be sorted by the existing optical sorting systems used widely in plastics recycling as the black pigment reflects little or no light.