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Mondelēz International, PepsiCo and Pladis are participating in a Belgium-wide trial exploring whether digital watermarking technology could improve the identification and sorting of flexible food packaging for recycling.

The project will assess the performance of invisible digital watermarks on wrappers, films and other plastic food packaging collected through Belgium’s household recycling system.

The technology is designed to enable sorting equipment to identify packaging characteristics, including material type and whether the packaging previously contained food. This could allow waste streams to be separated more accurately and potentially support the production of recycled material suitable for food-contact applications.

Digital watermarks are imperceptible codes applied across the surface of packaging during printing. In the trial, watermarks supplied by Digimarc will be detected using specialist sorting equipment.

The initiative forms part of the HolyGrail 2030 – Circular Packaging Consortium, facilitated by AIM – European Brands Association. The consortium brings together around 79 companies and organisations across the packaging, technology, sorting, recycling and research sectors.

The Belgian trials are being led by packaging recovery organisation Fost Plus. Film collected and sorted in Belgium will be sent to Hündgen Entsorgungs’ sorting facility in Germany, where high-resolution cameras supplied by Pellenc ST will detect and read the watermarks.

According to the consortium, the project is the first national-scale European trial involving flexible post-consumer packaging collected through a household recycling system.

Flexible food packaging remains particularly difficult to recycle into high-quality material suitable for food-contact applications due to the quality and safety standards required. Improved identification and sorting could contribute to addressing this challenge alongside recycling and decontamination technologies.

The trial comes ahead of recycled content requirements introduced under the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), which will begin applying to certain categories of plastic packaging from 2030. These include a minimum recycled content requirement of 10% for some contact-sensitive plastic packaging applications.

Liz Morrish, operations director and member of the CEFLEX leadership team, said: “Food-contact recycled content is where the industry has some of the biggest challenges and the least time. This trial moves testing from evidence-gathering into commercial reality, which is exactly what bridging the gap between ambition and the 2030 targets requires.”

Russell Avens, director of breakthrough packaging, innovation and technology at pladis, said the project would provide evidence on how flexible food packaging could be identified and returned to use at scale while maintaining food safety and product protection requirements.

Dominika Maruszak-Dankbaar, senior packaging sustainability manager for global foods R&D at PepsiCo, added that flexible plastics remain one of the more complex areas of packaging circularity and will require collaboration across the value chain.

Richard Akkermans, European R&D packaging productivity and sustainability manager at Mondelēz International, said the trial would provide practical technical learnings as companies prepare for the EU's future recycled content requirements.

Constantia Flexibles is also participating in the project, integrating the digital watermark technology into printed packaging designs. Dietmar Lenko, vice-president of consumer innovation and product sustainability at the company, said applying watermarks across a large area of packaging could allow them to remain detectable even where packs have been damaged.

Fost Plus business innovation manager Philippe Gendebien said Belgium's national household collection infrastructure and sorting facilities provide a suitable environment for testing the technology under real-world conditions.