Horizon Packaging: Food-Contact Plastic Recycling
Funds industrial consortia that recycle multilayer plastic food packaging back into food-contact-safe plastic, at scale.
Most flexible food packaging is a stack of different plastic layers, and that mix is exactly what makes it so hard to recycle. There's no working system today that takes a used multilayer wrapper and turns it back into plastic clean enough to touch food again — so nearly all of it gets burned, landfilled, or downcycled into something lower-value instead of going back into a new package.
This topi…
Demonstrating (TRL 6-8) how to make multilayer flexible plastic food packaging recyclable back into food-contact-compliant plastic, at industrial scale. Proposals redesign the film for mono-material recyclability, improve sorting yield with physical and/or digital technology (AI, watermarking or similar), and run the separation, purification and decontamination steps needed to get the output plastic to meet EU food-contact rules (Regulation 2022/1616 and Regulation 1935/2004). The project also has to demonstrate a large-scale digital circularity solution, such as a digital product passport, and show — with real evidence, including a lifecycle assessment — how the recycled content share in new food packaging can go up.
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Guides for this application
All guides →Horizon Europe Grants for Startups: A Founder Guide
A practical guide to Horizon Europe grants for startups, including EIC, consortia, eligibility, Funding & Tenders, TRL, budgets, and EU strategy.
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Start hereTRL Levels Explained for Deeptech Founders
Learn what TRL levels mean, how to estimate technology readiness, and how TRL affects grants, EIC Accelerator, SBIR/STTR, funding stage, and application evidence.
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