POLYPROBLEM report: The Circularity Code

Three questions for: Jochen Moesslein of Polysecure “MORE SHOW THAN REAL IMPACT” Jochen Moesslein is the founder and mastermind behind Polysecure, based in Freiburg, Germany. His company develops technologies to invisibly mark plastics and other materials, with fluorescent markers being the best known among these. Combined with the appropriate sorting technology, also developed by Polysecure, material and waste streams can be optimized. Companies can also use the markers to label their own products to make them traceable. Jochen Moesslein is also known as a committed activist in his sector. His high-tech business applies digital tools as part of the solution. By his own admission, however, digitalization is by no means the magic pill that will cure all the ailments of the circular economy. Jochen, what are currently the biggest challenges of digitalizing the recycling sector? Digitalization is an overrated word. The technical challenges of recycling have little to do with digitalization. The important aspects of the circular economy are recognition processes, sorting, and processing, and digitalization plays no role in any of these. It’s about being able to reliably differentiate materials in ten milliseconds, like separating food contact materials from nonfood contact materials. More than half of the stuff comes in chopped up chunks of material, so you can’t even recognize the material via object recognition or artificial intelligence. We need a physical process that allows us to measure the material’s composition directly and quickly. Mean voices might say that the digital hype in our industry has a greater impact on marketing than on creating actual impact. Sometimes I even get the impression that the unrealistic hopes associated with digitalization are delaying investments in other important areas of technology. You have been developing marker materials and detection technologies since 2009. What propelled you to found Polysecure? The initial impetus was to make materials more intelligent. Plastics, ceramics, paper – it’s just a huge amount of recyclable waste, which we as consumers in Germany dump into the big yellow garbage can. I was simply driven by the question of how to turn this mess back into useful material. 14

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODI5MzU=