The initiative brings together stakeholders of the plastics value chain to provide recycled plastic circularity, tracking, and sorting.
BASF has announced that its reciChain initiative would be expanded to Alberta, Canada. The initiative is a technology-enabled ecosystem that brings together participants of the plastics value chain to allow recycled plastic circularity, monitoring, and sorting.
Several firms, including Cascades, Layfield, London Drugs, Nova Chemicals, Orion Plastics, [Re] Waste, and Waste & Recycling Services from Calgary and Edmonton, cooperated to extend the program in Alberta, according to a press release from BASF.
The initiative brings together stakeholders of the plastics value chain to provide recycled plastic circularity, tracking, and sorting.
BASF has announced that its reciChain initiative would be expanded to Alberta, Canada. The initiative is a technology-enabled ecosystem that brings together participants of the plastics value chain to allow recycled plastic circularity, monitoring, and sorting.
Several firms, including Cascades, Layfield, London Drugs, Nova Chemicals, Orion Plastics, [Re] Waste, and Waste & Recycling Services from Calgary and Edmonton, cooperated to extend the program in Alberta, according to a press release from BASF.
“Plastics have been shown to be beneficial in a variety of applications, including food preservation, automobile light-weighting, medical equipment, and building insulation, to name a few. Plastic waste, on the other hand, is a big global issue, according to Apala Mukherjee, president of BASF Canada, situated in Mississauga, Ontario. “We need to establish a more circular economy for plastics via innovation and collaboration across the value chain to overcome this environmental challenge.” This is precisely what reciChain brings to the table.”
According to BASF, the reciChain pilot initiative began in Brazil and was then expanded to British Columbia, Canada. The British Columbia pilot, according to the corporation, showed circularity by tracing items’ life cycles from pellet to pellet.
reciChain is extending to Alberta to perform the next part of the project, which BASF claims will get the solution to a semicommercial phase, with the help of Alberta Innovates, a provincial government entity charged with encouraging innovation in the province.
Laura Kilcrease, CEO of Alberta Innovates, states, “Creating a cleaner world starts at the local level in communities all around the country and right here in Alberta.” “Innovative schemes like reciChain are transforming the plastic recycling industry. Alberta Innovates is thrilled to support this collaboration and looks forward to the program’s outcomes.”
The reciChain program consists of two technological components: a physical tracer that identifies and follows key plastic features throughout the value chain to enable the connection of plastic to a digital twin, and a blockchain marketplace that creates and translates the digital twin to provide a secure, auditable transfer of ownership while also assigning incentives to encourage participation and offset costs.
Among the objectives of the program are the following:
-decreasing overall pollution levels and boosting the province’s recyclability;
-rising need for recyclability solutions for plastics;
-promoting recycled content auditability in support of expanded producer responsibility schemes; and
-Changing customer perceptions of the usage of virgin plastics in the province while also promoting brand loyalty among provincial enterprises.
