Digimarc launches plastic waste sortation software to drive circularity and meet legislative requirements

Digimarc Corporation has released its Digimarc Recycle sortation software for consistently and accurately identifying the material composition of waste packaging using digital watermarks — reducing the cost of compliant hardware “by nearly 50%.”

Digimarc Recycle increases the precision and accuracy of recycled material sorting machines, which “lowers the entry barrier” for global recycling and waste sorting facilities. 

Digimarc’s CEO, Riley McCormack, stresses that the problem of plastic pollution is growing exponentially.

“We need solutions that are profitable, effective and can revolutionize the recycling economy now — not in a few years when the problem will be dramatically worse. Digimarc Recycle is ready and available today.”

Next-gen sortation enhanced with AI 

Current technologies offer limited sortation parameters that can lead to misidentification and result in cross-contaminated plastic that cannot be close-loop recycled. 

Next-gen sortation is essential to making a circular plastics economy viable, asserts Digimarc.

The company’s system links digital watermarks applied to plastic packaging with a cloud database of extensive product attributes — including packaging composition, food or non-food grade plastic, product variant, brand and SKU.

Digimarc increases sortation specificity using sorting machines that employ cameras and Digimarc Recycle software to detect recycled materials on moving belts. 

In the latest version of its Recycle sortation software, Digimarc has redesigned its detector operations to work with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) that are increasingly used in AI applications.

“In redesigning our detector software operations for GPUs, we’re harnessing the parallel processing capabilities and the performance and cost advantages they provide,” says Ravi Sharma, Digimarc’s vice president for Research and Development. 

“As a result, we’ve reduced the hardware needed for our detection technology, thereby reducing the compute cost of Digimarc’s detection module by up to 70%, while achieving the same performance. It’s a win-win for recycling facilities and the industry, as our latest release increases the ROI for all recycling ecosystem participants.”

Meeting PPWR requirements

Digimarc considers its digital watermarking the only advanced sortation solution capable of accurately detecting and sorting distinct plastic varieties, including food, cosmetic and hygiene grade plastics. The technology works for all form factors including rigid and flexible packaging. 

This makes it a more holistic and immediate solution to drive circularity. In addition, the SKU-level, product-variant level or item-level specificity that digital watermarking provides is essential for meeting traceability requirements set forth by the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR).

Digimarc’s latest version of the Recycle software is fully operational in the Hündgen material recovery facility in Germany, installed in a sorting machine created by Pellenc ST, a manufacturer of optical sorting machines. 

Within a day of the module being functional, Digimarc says that thousands of its digital watermarked items were identified at the facility, demonstrating that this technology is “not only available, but also effective at scale.”

“Achieving such a significant reduction in cost while maintaining efficacy is a key success factor for implementation of the technology in the recycling industry,” says Antoine Bourely, co-founder and chief scientific officer at Pellenc ST. 

“We are eagerly looking forward to the use and validation of this latest version of Digimarc’s Recycle software using GPUs in industrial conditions.”