Innate closing the loop in Europe.

Bruno Demuynck,

Published: 2010-03-17

The decision to grasp the opportunity and to collaborate followed naturally after a couple more meetings. Today my company Ibex Consultancy distributes Innate in the Benelux and Germany and we are very proud to say that we have an end of life solution in place for their food and drink containers. We can close the loop!

How does the end of life solution work?

Suppose your bottle gets damaged, because it fell off a cliff or got accidently smashed when you drove your car over it. Through a couple of steps your bottle will be upcycled and converted into raw material to be used in another application. Here are the steps of the upcycling process:

Dismantling at home. Unscrew the lid and take out the silicone parts like the o-ring. For proper recycling it’s crucial to separate silicone from polypropylene because these two materials will act like adversaries when you try to recycle them together.

Take a metal saw – yes you can try this at home - and make two incisions in the polypropylene collar until you reach the bottom of the polypropylene collar.

Pry off with a screwdriver the polypropylene collar, you have now completed the hardest part of the job!

Once the separation is complete, you can start the recycling process. If you include these materials with regular community recycling collection common in North America then there is a chance that the sorting  process may not distinguish the relatively expensive stainless steel. However if you are lucky enough to live in Belgium, you can drop off the stainless steel bottle, the polypropylene and silicone parts in the collection box at participating retailers or mail it to the designated collection center; details will be forthcoming.

At the collection center we will store all the parts in separate containers per material type and once these are full, the local recycling partners come and pick up the goods.We have partnered with 2 local recycling companies in Belgium for the plastics and stainless steel, thus keeping the carbon footprint as low as possible.

The local recycling partners upcycle the stainless steel and polypropylene into new raw materials, which will be subsequently used in other applications.

I'm pleased with these initial steps; we still have work to do including finding an efficient solution for recycling the silicone parts, I hope to solve this in the coming months. Another challenge is keeping the carbon footprint as low as possible when collecting the recyclable material; to date we have a two-fold solution to overcome this challenge. Firstly we define several collection territories in Europe, with selected local recycling partners, and secondly we will be approaching other companies in Europe to join our end of life solution. More companies working together will lead to increased volumes of  recycled products and higher efficiencies on transportation.

Bruno De Muynck