In 2022, industry leaders ExxonMobil, Cyclyx International, Sealed Air, and Ahold Delhaize USA announced their intention to be the first in the United States to successfully launch a circular food packaging proof of concept leveraging advanced recycling.
Leveraging ExxonMobil's Exxtend technology for advanced recycling, plastic waste is broken down into molecular building blocks and attributed to new plastic for food-grade packaging. Following a viable test, the process is evaluated for scale.
This collaboration demonstrated that creating a circular economy is achievable with value chain collaboration.
Creating a circular economy for food contact plastic packaging in applications with strict safety and performance requirements is a complex industry challenge.
"This project helps demonstrate how Exxtend technology can widen the range of plastic materials that can be recycled while delivering certified-circular polymers with the critical performance attributes of virgin plastic," said Dan Moore, vice president, Polyethylene, ExxonMobil.
"Advanced recycling makes the impossible possible and is an important enabler to support a circular economy."
Ahold Delhaize USA brand Food Lion supported the initial pilot, collecting plastic waste for recycling at select store locations. With more than 1,100 stores across ten states, Food Lion is one of the five brands that comprise the Ahold Delhaize USA network, the largest grocery retail group on the East Coast and the fourth largest in the nation.
"Across Ahold Delhaize USA companies, we have ambitious goals around recyclable and reusable packaging," said Adam Springer, Product Sustainability manager at Ahold Delhaize USA.
Springer elaborated that based on the initial pilot, the company was optimistic about leveraging this process at a different scale and looked forward to exploring it further as part of this collaboration.
Cyclyx, a joint venture between Agilyx Corporation and ExxonMobil, was responsible for sorting and pre-processing the waste packaging materials collected from the Food Lion stores before delivering them to ExxonMobil's Baytown, Texas facility.
The CEO of Cyclyx, Joe Vaillancourt, stated that the interface between the Food Lion stores and the Baytown facility was critical and required an innovative approach to feedstock management.
Vaillancourt stated that part of the company's process was identifying the chemical composition of the waste plastics we receive. This allowed the company to create custom blends of post-use plastic feedstock tailored to the specifications required for advanced recycling.
At the Baytown facility, Extend technology for advanced recycling was used to recycle valuable end-of-life plastics and attribute them via mass balance accounting to certified-circular polymers.
This technology provided a reliable source to attribute to high-performance, certified-circular polymers.
"The resulting polymers, such as Exceed S, Exceed XP, Exceed and Enable performance polyethylene (PE), have the characteristics of virgin resins, critical for food-grade packaging," shared Moore.
Sealed Air, which has been leading the packaging industry by designing and creating high-performance packaging materials that can be remade, converted the certified-circular PE resins into a food-grade flexible film that is used, in the case of this proof of concept, to package select Nature's Promise fresh poultry.
The packaging then returns to stores used on products purchased by customers, demonstrating an example of the circular economy.
Vice president of Global Corporate Affairs at Sealed Air, Ron Cotterman, revealed that by collaborating with suppliers and customers, the company could identify, design, and commercialise an innovative, flexible packaging solution that supports circularity.
Exxtend technology can be rapidly scaled to process a wide range of plastic waste by leveraging ExxonMobil's existing manufacturing assets. To help meet the growing market demand for certified-circular plastics, ExxonMobil has plans to increase its annual advanced recycling capacity to 500,000 metric tons, or approximately one billion pounds, by year-end 2026 across multiple sites globally.
