UKRI awards £3.2M through novel packaging tech scale-up challenge
31 Mar 2023 --- UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has awarded 17 projects a total of £3.2 million (US$3.9 million) to scale up novel solutions to plastic waste prevention and management. The winners fall into three target areas: alternative materials producers, reuse and refill initiatives, and improved recycling and geographic mapping technologies.
Launched under the UKRI’s Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge, the competition is dubbed Future Packaging Solutions II and seeks to advance plastic waste management critical areas through novel groups and ideas.
Paul Davidson, challenge director for UKRI’s SSPP Challenge, says: “SSPP is working to make plastic packaging fit for a sustainable future, supporting over 70 research and innovation projects focused on consumer plastic packaging.”
“Taken together, these latest SSPP-funded projects offer exciting opportunities to tackle plastic packaging waste holistically by reducing it at source, encouraging the rollout of reuse and refill business models, and driving more effective and sophisticated recycling and pollution monitoring and measuring.”
Plant protein films being cast in Xampla’s lab.Bio-based boom
Five of the awarded projects are assessing the viability of a range of different plant-based biodegradable polymers to replace fossil fuel-based plastics. Innova Market Insights recently listed “Renewable rebellion” as a top trend for 2023, noting geopolitical and economic uncertainties are driving interest in bio-based packaging materials.
“Fluctuations in the prices of oil and gas, which act as substrates for manufacturing polymers, is likely to provide an impetus for companies to further explore bioplastics and packaging solutions made from renewable sources such as paper,” explains Akhil Aiyar, a project leader for the market analyst.
Notable winners include Xampla, a spin-off company from the University of Cambridge, UK, which has developed plant protein-based biomaterial that can replace synthetic materials and virgin polymers.
Researchers behind the project told us of how they mimicked the composition of spider silk – one of nature’s strongest natural materials – to create a viable plastic alternative.
Another winner, PlantSea, has developed seaweed-based film capsules that can be used for liquid and powder concentrates for personal care products, such as shampoos, conditioners and creams. The project will assess the feasibility and accelerate the scaling-up of the capsules and refill-at-home system for cosmetics, cleaning, laundry and F&B products.
Reuse and refill 
AI waste-picking robots from Recycleye.Among the winners pioneering new reuse and refill designs is Cauli, which is building a smart reusable system intended to improve the user experience of borrowing and returning reusable cups, with the aim of helping the cafe industry transition to reuse systems by making the process of sourcing, returning, collecting and washing convenient and accessible.
Through an automated system that can be integrated to vendors’ point of sale, users can borrow a reusable cup free of charge and return at a smart return kiosk where the returned cups will be washed and redistributed.
Another notable winner is Topup Truck – a mobile zero-waste shop that brings a refill shop to consumers’ doors via an electronic vehicle.
This approach overcomes some of the key barriers to refill adoption, claims the start-up.
Problems solved by the solution include getting heavy containers to the shop while continuing to offer consumers the option to buy as much as they need and to buy on impulse. The project will partner with University of Arts London to conduct a study into how a mobile refill shop can be optimized in terms of customer experience and communications to widen refill adoption.
AI mapping
The final category of improving recycling and mapping technologies for finding packaging waste sites saw Plastic-i, a UK-based startup that claims to have produced the world’s first commercially available software for tracking marine pollution.
Using satellite data and artificial intelligence (AI), Plastic-i is building a platform to facilitate the identification and removal of marine plastic “on a global scale.” The platform will detect, map and classify floating debris. It will then provide decision-makers and clean-up operators with actionable insights to boost efficiency and measure the efficacy of interventions.
Recycleye, which recently landed US$17 million in a series A funding round, was also included in UKRI’s list of grantees. The company uses AI-powered waste-picking robots to lower the cost of sorting materials.
According to Recycleye, this “ground-breaking” technology is turning the world’s waste into resources and delivering data essential for dynamic decision-making in a material recovery facility.
By Louis Gore-Langton
