PragmatIC receives £1.3m contract from UK Government Sustainable Innovation Fund to turn waste into worth

PragmatIC‘s ultra-low-cost RFID to enable rewarding recycling and packaging re-use

PragmatIC, a world leader in flexible electronics, has been awarded a £1.3 million contract from the UK Government Sustainable Innovation Fund for a state-of-the-art recycling scheme based on PragmatIC’s ultra-low-cost NFC technology. In an initiative code-named SPRITE (Sustainable Plastics Recycling Innovation by Tagging Electronically), PET bottles and refillable packaging will be given unique digital IDs to support automated identification and recycling.

Worldwide more than one million plastic bottles are made per minute and less than 10% of those are collected and turned into new bottles; the rest are landfilled, incinerated or are littered, polluting the environment. Deposit return schemes are already well proven to increase recycling rates, with leading systems recovering over 90% of the containers which have a deposit on them. But these are built around returning bottles back to grocery stores and require well-developed, and often rigid, state or nationwide processes to be in place.

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