Digimarc taps pilot market for expansion of HolyGrail 2.0

Digimarc Corporation announced an expansion of the Digital Watermarks Initiative HolyGrail 2.0. Building on successful semi-industrial trials, stakeholders across the packaging value chain have selected France as the European pilot market for Digimarc Recycle. All operators in France have been invited to participate, marking an expansion in activities that were previously limited to HolyGrail 2.0 members.

“As the semi-industrial trials clearly demonstrated last year, digital watermarking technology has the power to transform recycling,” says Digimarc CEO Riley McCormack. “We could not be more thrilled to support our partners in France as they progress in their journey to achieving a more circular economy.”

Last year, the HolyGrail 2.0 project announced results from European trials that showed that Digimarc’s technology achieved a 99% average detection rate across all tested categories of plastic packaging. The effectiveness of Digimarc Recycle has also been validated in Canada with a 99% detection rate in a pilot with the Circular Plastics Taskforce (CPT). CPT aims to implement Digimarc Recycle in Canadian facilities in 2023 to enable the separation of flexibles by attributes, allowing the creation of new end-markets.

“Momentum is building globally,” McCormack explains. “Stakeholders – particularly consumers and governments – are no longer willing to accept inaction. With regulation like the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation in the EU on the horizon, Digimarc can support companies with the innovation they need to comply, demonstrate leadership, and foster a more sustainable future.”

Digimarc is a global leader in product digitization, delivering business value across industries through unique identifiers and cloud-based solutions. A trusted partner in deterring digital counterfeiting of global currency for more than 20 years, Digimarc uncovers a product's journey to provide intelligence and promote a prosperous, safer, and more sustainable world. Digimarc Recycle represents a revolution in the sortation, and thus the recycling, of plastic waste. By linking covert digital watermarks (used to deterministically identify plastic packaging to any desired level of granularity) with an extensible cloud-based repository of product attributes (such as brand, SKU, product variant, packaging composition, food/non-food use, etc.), Digimarc Recycle overcomes the limitations of today’s optical sorting technologies to drive a step-change improvement in the quality and quantity of recyclate. Moreover, the same information used to drive this advanced sortation in facilities can be used to provide product-specific and location-based disposal instructions via a brand-owned direct-to-consumer digital communication channel accessed via on-pack watermarks or QR codes.

In addition to providing the information necessary to power advanced sortation both at collection as well as in facilities, Digimarc Recycle captures and provides a holistic view of the post-purchase product journey benefitting stakeholders across the value chain. Producer Responsibility Organizations can design and implement more meaningful, and more accurate EPR schemes, facility operators can unlock operational efficiencies and insights, and brand owners and retailers can access data to power design-for-recyclability improvements, packaging-usage reductions, consumer behavior insights and overall operational gains.

The Digital Watermarks Initiative HolyGrail 2.0 – driven by AIM - European Brands Association and powered by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste – is a pilot project with the objective to prove the technical viability of digital watermarks for accurate sorting of packaging waste as well as the economic viability of the business case at large-scale. Digital watermarks are imperceptible codes, the size of a postage stamp, covering the surface of consumer goods packaging and carrying a wide range of attributes. The aim is that once the packaging has entered a waste sorting facility, the digital watermark can be detected and decoded by a high-resolution camera on the sorting line, which then – based on the transferred attributes (e.g., food vs. non-food) – is able to sort the packaging in corresponding streams. This would result in better and more accurate sorting streams, thus consequently in higher quality recyclates benefiting the complete packaging value chain.