Circular Economy Solutions For Plastics - CircularAssure

Advancing recycled plastic development and enabling the circular economy for plastics through assurance, testing and certification services, we support brands, recycling companies, polymers, plastics, and packaging businesses and other stakeholders in the recycled plastics value chain to close the loop with CircularAssure

To achieve a circular economy for plastics and advance recycled plastic development, significant challenges must be overcome. Plastics are used in all areas of day-to-day life, including packaging to keep food safe, in medical devices and PPE, in toys, automotive and electronic applications.

Across all sectors, climate change, energy use, pervasive waste in our environment, changing consumer preferences and pressures from investors or governments are driving companies to reduce their environmental impact and justify their green claims.

Legislative developments including the European Green Deal, EU Directives on waste or single-use plastics, and the UK Plastics Packaging Tax are driving companies throughout the polymers/plastics value chain to rethink wasteful production, consider what happens after consumption of their products and build a strategy for plastics in a circular economy. Companies are also looking to accelerate innovation processes which are driven by sustainability goals to achieve safe, well-performing products that are differentiated in the marketplace.

Plastics and the Circular Economy
Most plastics are made from petrochemicals and many plastic products are designed to be used once, then discarded into landfills, burned, or become pervasive waste in our environment including our oceans and rivers. Plastic pollution is rapidly outpacing efforts to prevent or reduce it, however, by rethinking how we design and develop plastic materials and how we use them, stakeholders can create a circular economy. Innovation is required to ensure that the plastics we do need are reusable, recyclable, or compostable and strategies to circulate plastics are required so that we use to keep them in the economy and out of the environment.

CircularAssure - Plastic Circular Economy Assurance Solutions
Intertek’s CircularAssure is a risk-based quality assurance program, which comprises a program of assurance, testing, certification services and unique insight-enabling analytical technologies that can be applied across the recycled plastic value chain. From waste collectors and recycling companies to polymer producers and brands, CircularAssure provides plastics circular economy solutions to ensure quality, safety, and optimise value of recycled plastic materials and products including:

• Waste collectors and mechanical recycling companies can improve profitability of their recycled plastic product through insight-enabling testing to determine the quality of materials that have come from recycling.
• Chemical recycling companies will be able to boost process efficiencies and understand the variability of materials through CircularAssure’s inline chemical analysis technology and quality control testing service.
• Polymer producers will be able to assess how processable new recycled materials are through lab-scale processing and performance test programs. Additionally, CircularAssure will help them to evaluate materials against safety and performance specifications for their intended use through regulatory-led analysis such as migration testing which is required to ensure food packaging compliance.
• Brands will be able to demonstrate the levels of recycled content where the novel materials are used in products through recycled content certification.

Intertek CircularAssure - Enabling the Plastics Circular Economy

From electronics to automotive, from packaging to construction, across all sectors that use polymers or plastics, CircularAssure helps businesses to close the loop and tell their sustainability story. 
Contact our CircularAssure team now to discover how our risk-based quality assurance program can help you to achieve Total Quality Assurance and accelerate innovation of well-performing, safe and compliant products and processes that benefit our daily lives.