INNOVATION | BIO-BASED PLASTICS


Right:


Sansu and TotalEnergies Corbion collaborated to develop a label-free PLA beverage bottle for the South Korean market


by producers, such as NatureWorks, with baled post-consumer PLA materials sorted using NIR.” A long-standing concern that PLA could con-


taminate the PET bottle recycling stream arose decades ago, but is not actually a problem today, according to Davies. In the early days, beverage bottle recycling used manual sortation, which was possible because nearly all beverages were packaged in ISBM PET bottles. “In that situation, it was true that a clear ‘look-alike’ bottle made from PLA would not be manually distinguishable,” he recalled. Today, PLA entering the mixed recycled stream as thermoformed containers poses similar challenges to sortation as other non-PET articles, and automated sortation systems, such as those using NIR sensors, can be used to separate out PLA and other plastics from PET, Davies said. A key challenge for recycling PLA is achieving a


large enough scale in the recycling stream that it becomes economical to invest in sortation systems, suggested Davies. He noted that techniques such as mining the residual stream of mixed plastics leaving a MRF is one way to make the case for recycling materials that are present at lower concentrations. “It is in streams such as this that newer materials will tend to concentrate, by default, as larger volume materials such as PP and PET are removed for recovery upstream. This improves the economics of recovery,” Davies said.


PLA possibilities Researchers at Ghent University in Belgium, Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and other partners in the EU’s PROSPER (Promoting innova- tion for sustainable sorting and recycling of dedicated bio-based plastics) project recently analyzed the question of whether PLA packaging waste could contaminate the PET bottle stream in material recovery facilities (MRFs) using a math- ematical model. According to a recently published paper, the authors said that, with the current market penetration of PLA, their model predicted less than 10 ppm of PLA in the PET bottle stream, which is well below the threshold of 1,000 ppm where it is thought that PLA could cause degrada- tion in PET. They predicted that at a high market penetration of PLA, with effective sorting, the level of PLA in the PET stream might reach 200 ppm, which is still below the threshold. The researchers also estimated sorting cost and concluded that at just over 2% post-consumer PLA packaging material in MRF input streams, it would become economical for MRFs to invest in NIR sortation to target PLA packaging. The authors noted that many other parameters (eg, market


12 PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD | April 2026


demand, labour cost, landfill or incineration fees) could also affect the model. If PLA is sorted out of a mixed waste stream, the


material could be either mechanically or chemically recycled.


Because PLA is made from one monomer (lactic acid) it is relatively easy to chemically convert back to its monomer form, explained Davies. “From that point, the lactic acid monomer can be readily repolymerized to polymer, with no loss in proper- ties that often comes with the heat history of mechanically recycling materials,” he noted. TotalEnergies Corbion has been active in making chemically recycled PLA (rPLA) available. In 2021, the company launched Luminy rPLA partially made from post-industrial and post-consumer PLA waste. The company takes pre-processed PLA waste and depolymerizes it via hydrolysis to the lactic acid monomer, which is purified and repo- lymerized into Luminy rPLA. According to an independently verified life cycle assessment published in 2025, using production data from the TotalEnergies Corbion plant in Thailand, materials with 30% rPLA can reach carbon neutrality, and 100% rPLA achieves a negative carbon footprint. Some of the first partners to support collecting,


sorting and cleaning of post-industrial and post- consumer PLA waste were Looplife in Belgium and Sansu in Korea. Most recently, Sansu and TotalEner- gies Corbion collaborated to develop a label-free PLA beverage bottle for the South Korean market that uses embossed branding as an alternative to a conventional label, eliminating the need for label removal before recycling. The companies had been working on the closed-loop collection and repro- cessing system since 2021 and announced the


www.plasticsrecyclingworld.com


IMAGE: SANSU


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