Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV
The activities of the Fraunhofer IVV focus on the materials recycling process of selective extraction, which at its core consists of a physical extraction process for plastics with subsequent purification. It is marketed as the CreaSolv® process and has proven its suitability for recycling post-consumer plastics from the packaging, construction, electronics and automotive sectors in a large number of projects (e.g. Horizon 2020 projects "Multicycle", "CloseWEEE", "Nontox", "Circular Flooring"). A decisive advantage of the process is the production of high-purity plastics whose quality is above that of mechanically sorted plastics and can compete directly with virgin materials. For quality assessment, the Fraunhofer IVV has standardized and specially developed laboratory testing methods. Furthermore, the institute operates a small-scale production line (production capacity of 5-10 kg/day) for the development, optimization and upscaling of recycling processes and is currently having a demonstration plant built with an envisaged capacity of 20 kg/h (operation from Q3 2021). This is ideally suited for demonstration and sample production of recyclates for market sampling. Within the framework of "Waste4Future", this plant capacity opens up options for optimized waste material flow management and a linking of recycling processes. Together with Fraunhofer UMSICHT, work has already been done on expanded recycling processes for recyclable material streams containing plastics.