Chemicals and materials science giant Dow and Google’s breakthrough technologies initiative, X The Moonshot Factory, announced the launch of a new partnership aimed at improving the circularity of hard to recycle plastics such as films and flexibles, by using AI technology in recycling systems.
According to the companies, the new collaboration comes to address a key challenge to improving plastics circularity, with films and flexibles – which are becoming increasingly common due to their ability to protect perishable products such as food – often composed of different types of plastics and used together with other materials, making them difficult to identify and sort, leading only a small proportion currently being accepted by recycling systems.
In a post announcing the new collaboration, Han Zhang, Global Sustainability Director, Packaging and Specialty Plastics at Dow, said:
“By combining Dow’s expertise in materials science with Google’s advanced machine learning and AI technologies, we aim to revolutionize the way recycling centers process plastics, making the process more efficient and effective.”
Google’s X said that the collaboration follows several years of work by its “Moonshot for Circularity” initiative to build the first comprehensive database to catalog plastics in packaging through the use of chemistry, machine learning, AI, and Google’s compute power, with the data applied to enable industrial-scale plastic identification and sortation. Under the new partnership, X said that it is looking to do the same for films and flexibles, tapping into Dow’s capabilities “as both a producer and recycler of these materials.” The companies added that they have already demonstrated the capability to use machine vision tools to accurately identify the components of films and flexibles and predict the material composition percentages in each piece of packaging.
X said:
“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.”
