While regulatory attention often focuses on packaging placed on the market, the transition towards circularity also involves the waste streams generated within industrial processes. Some of these materials, including technical films, single-use bags and auxiliary fabrics, present challenges that are familiar to many areas of plastic packaging: contamination, heterogeneity, complex material composition and limited compatibility with conventional recycling systems.
This is the context behind IMPLICIT, a research project focused on the valorisation of single-use auxiliary waste from composite manufacturing. These materials, which include vacuum bags, release films and absorbent or technical fabrics, are widely used in sectors such as aerospace, railway, naval and renewable energy to ensure the quality of composite manufacturing processes. However, once used, they are often sent to landfill or incineration because they are difficult to recycle and have historically been excluded from valorisation strategies.
IMPLICIT Targets Hard-to-Recycle Auxiliary Materials
The IMPLICIT project aims to transform these difficult-to-recycle waste streams into new recycled raw materials for high-value applications. The initiative brings together companies and technology centres across the plastics value chain, including Solteco, Birziplastik, Faperin, Industrias Alegre, AIMPLAS, Eurecat, Tecnalia and Leartiker. Airbus is also collaborating as a strategic partner by providing real waste generated from aerospace manufacturing processes.
AIMPLAS is acting as technical leader of the project, which seeks to develop recycling strategies capable of recovering these materials with the highest possible purity and enabling their industrial reuse. For the wider plastics industry, the project reflects a broader challenge: circularity cannot be limited to clean and easily sorted waste streams, but must also address materials that are contaminated, heterogeneous or technically complex.
A Multimodal Route for Industrial Plastic Waste
From a technical perspective, IMPLICIT is based on a multimodal recycling approach that combines mechanical, physical and chemical technologies. The project focuses on materials mainly manufactured with thermoplastic polymers such as PA, PET, PE and PP, integrating processes such as shredding, separation and extrusion with selective dissolution and chemical recycling technologies, including solvolysis.
The aim is not only to recover materials, but to validate them in real applications. The recycled outputs are expected to be transformed into new products such as technical automotive parts, profiles for urban furniture and multifilaments for technical textiles. This industrial validation is a key part of the project, because advanced recycling routes can only support circularity if the resulting materials meet functional, economic and environmental requirements.
IMPLICIT also addresses challenges such as resin contamination and waste variability through decontamination, compounding and additive formulation processes designed to improve the mechanical properties of recycled materials. Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Costing analyses will be used to evaluate the environmental, economic and functional impact of the developed solutions.
Although the project is not directly focused on packaging, it speaks to a wider issue that is highly relevant to the packaging value chain: the future of plastic circularity will depend on the ability to manage complex waste streams, not only the most recyclable ones. As industries work to reduce landfill and incineration, projects such as IMPLICIT show how advanced recycling can open new routes for materials that were previously considered too difficult to recover.
Image Credits: AIMPLAS
