With recycling becoming essential for maintaining environmental sustainability, companies worldwide have started to initiate groundbreaking initiatives to promote plastic reuse. Recently, BASF Canada, a subsidiary of BASF SE, made a move by launching a pilot platform, dubbed reciChain, in British Columbia. The platform focuses on enabling better traceability, transparency, and sorting of recycled plastics in the value chain. ReciChain was introduced as a more sustainable option to the linear economic model, lowering plastic waste, improving its resource efficiency as well as boosting its value. The platform integrates a digital badge and loop count technology with the power of blockchain which facilitates a secured process of sharing data among other market players, while enhancing the tracing, monitoring and sorting method of plastics throughout the value chain. BASF Canada claims that the platform is relatively more competitive than a linear model, successfully prolonging the life cycle of plastic. According to a 2016 estimate, Canada disposed roughly 3.3 million tons of plastic scrap. From this, under 11% of plastic scraps was recycled, which means that remaining ended up in landfills or were lost to the environment. Marcelo Lu, President, BASF Canada, said that the economics of recycling plastic faces various global challenge. Much of which comes from sorting and collection activities that are currently challenged by material contamination and manual processes. Moreover, traceability has become a concern as new types of commitments emerge from retailers and brand owners. With reciChain, the company’s objective is to invigorate the importance of plastics and substantially enhance circularity in the supply chain. Being initially conducted in Brazil, reciChain emerged from the market’s need to tackle regulatory concerns around issuing recycling certificates along with social inequality concerns. The project has successfully secured participation from some of the largest Brazilian companies and will continue to be developed in parallel with the pilot project in Canada, cite sources. Source Credit: https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/basf-canada-pilot-project-recichain-british-columbia-recycled-plastics/
