BASF has announced that it is expanding its reciChain program to Alberta in Canada. The program is a technology-enabled ecosystem that brings together members from the plastics value chain to enable circularity, tracking and sorting of recycled plastic - Recycling Today

According to a news release from BASF, several companies partnered to expand the program in Alberta, including Cascades, Layfield, London Drugs, Nova Chemicals, Orion Plastics, [Re] Waste and Waste & Recycling Services from Calgary and Edmonton partnered to expand the program in Alberta.

“Plastics have proven benefits for multiple applications such as food preservation, automotive light-weighting, medical devices and building insulation, among many others. Plastic waste, however, poses a major global challenge,” says Apala Mukherjee, president of BASF Canada, which is based in Mississauga, Ontario. “To solve this environmental issue, we need to build a more circular economy for plastics through innovation and collaboration across the value chain. This is exactly what reciChain brings to the industry.”

BASF says it initially launched the reciChain pilot program in Brazil and later piloted it in British Columbia, Canada. The company says the British Columbia pilot proved circularity by tracking products’ life cycles from pellet to pellet.

With the support of Alberta Innovates, a provincial government corporation responsible for promoting innovation in the province, reciChain is expanding to Alberta to conduct the next phase of the project, which BASF says will bring the solution through to a semicommercial phase.

“Creating a cleaner world starts at the local level in communities all around the country and right here in Alberta,” says Laura Kilcrease, CEO of Alberta Innovates. “Innovative programs like reciChain are creating meaningful changes in plastic recycling. Alberta Innovates is pleased to support this partnership and looks forward to the results that flow from this program.”

The reciChain program includes two technology 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, assigning incentives to promote participation and offset costs.

The program has several goals, including:

• reducing overall contamination levels and increasing recyclability in the province;
• increasing demand for solutions for plastics recyclability;
• supporting auditability of recycled content that supports extended producer responsibility programs; and
• shifting consumer perspectives on the use of virgin plastics in the province as well as supporting brand loyalty for provincial businesses.