Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
The global release of plastics into the environment must be stopped. The Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Circular Plastics Economy CCPE® addresses the issue of how to design plastic so that it can be recycled or degrade quickly without residue.
Plastics are versatile: their low weight makes them indispensable for resource-efficient products. And yet plastic is underappreciated and considered to be a disposable item. Too many plastics end up in the incinerator, landfill or oceans at the end of their life. The solution: it is time to make the plastics economy circular and minimize the extraction of fossil resources and end-of-life losses.
Enabling actual recycling of plastic – that is the aim of the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Circular Plastics Economy CCPE®, which pools the expertise of six Fraunhofer Institutes. “A key aspect here is to organize a dialogue between all the different stakeholders along the value chain. It’s only by joining forces that we can accomplish this task,” says Dr. Hartmut Pflaum, head of the CCPE central office at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT. The researchers are committed to the issue of recycling, among other things. For example, they are investigating whether it is possible to digitally mark and map individual flows of plastic goods – i.e., to create a digital twin. In the case of a PC housing, for example, this would mean that a datafile created at the moment of production would be maintained throughout the entire product life cycle. Another group is looking at whether a “multicycle” plant might be used to recycle different types of plastic. Here, the most profitable business models are being identified and then scaled up.