Circular Economy

Covestro has officially announced its participation in Kollert, a publicly funded, interdisciplinary research consortium in Germany dedicated to developing recyclable product concepts for automotive lighting, mechatronics, and electronic components.

Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) under the CircularGlowUp framework and supervised by the Karlsruhe Project Management Agency (PTKA), the three-year project runs from June 2026 to May 2029 with a total funding volume of €4.371 million.

The European Union’s landmark Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) has officially entered into application across all EU Member States. Establishing a single harmonized legal framework for the EU Single Market, the PPWR replaces fragmented national rules to streamline compliance for cross-border businesses, accelerate waste reduction, and lower reliance on imported virgin raw materials.

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.

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.

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.