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UK retailer Aldi and dairy cooperative Arla Foods have partnered with recycling tech specialist Polytag to initiate an operational pilot aimed at tracking milk bottles through the UK recycling stream using advanced ultraviolet (UV) tagging technology.
Building on an initial pilot conducted in 2023, the collaboration seeks to gather granular, data-driven insights into how packaging moves beyond the point of sale and behaves within municipal waste systems.
The trial utilizes invisible fluorescent UV tags printed directly onto wrap-around labels for Arla milk bottles produced at its Oakthorpe facility. Printed by Saica Flex using food-safe inks developed by Sun Chemical, the wrap-around format was selected over previously tested pressure-sensitive labels to maximize durability, coverage, and processing efficiency during high-speed bottling operations.
Sorting Facility Detection: As tagged bottles pass through participating Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs), specialized Polytag detection units capture barcode-level data in real time without impacting sorting line speeds.
Polymer Quality Protection: Rigorous testing confirms that the proprietary fluorescent ink leaves recycled polymer streams untainted and retains full material recyclability.
Analytics Dashboard: Collected metrics are fed directly into a centralized dashboard, allowing brand owners to verify recovery rates and trace packaging flows.
“This next phase with Polytag represents an exciting step forward in how we use data to drive our sustainability strategy. By integrating this advanced traceability technology into our packaging, we can gain deeper insights into the lifecycle of our materials.”
— Luke Emery, Plastics and Packaging Director at Aldi UK
“As Europe’s largest dairy cooperative, Arla is committed to understanding how our packaging performs beyond point of sale. By working with Polytag, we hope to gain valuable insight into how milk bottle packaging moves through the recycling system, helping us to make more informed decisions about future packaging developments and supporting our ongoing efforts to improve packaging circularity.”
— Helena Delgado Nordmann, Head of Sustainability at Arla Foods UK
The deployment of digital watermarking, UV-tagging technology, real-time material tracking through Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs), and data-driven Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) frameworks will be central topics of discussion at the upcoming Go Circular Summit.
A team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has engineered a recyclable yarn made from polyethylene, offering a scalable solution to the global challenge of textile waste. Detailed in ACS Materials Letters, the research was led by Svetlana Boriskina, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, alongside first author SeongHyeon Kim and co-authors Duo Xu, Volodymyr Korolovych, Domingo Flores-Hernandez, Kaniz Moriam, and Daniel Braconnier.
The MIT team demonstrated that garments crafted from the engineered yarn can be melted down at the end of their lifecycle and respun into fresh fiber or molded into solid plastic hardware, such as buttons and belt buckles.
ABB and Swedish textile impact company Syre have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to explore how automation, electrification, and digital technologies can support the development of Syre’s first industrial-scale textile-to-textile recycling facility in Gia Lai province, Vietnam.
The exploratory collaboration provides a framework to assess how advanced process control, quality optimization, and electrical infrastructure can enable safe, efficient, and scalable production of circular polyester.
GreenDot France is exploring the acquisition of French Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) operator Léko, a move that could significantly reshape the country’s waste management and recycling landscape. The potential transaction aims to strengthen collection infrastructure, improve sorting networks, and accelerate the transition toward a circular economy in France.