Partnership formed to use digital watermarks on packaging for easy sorting
Digimarc Corporation, the pioneer in digital watermarking technologies, and Wipak, a leading provider of flexible packaging solutions for global markets, formed a strategic partnership in an eco-friendly strategy to product packaging.
By combining Digimarc digital watermarks and Wipak’s printed film technology, the partners help food, medical device and pharmaceutical companies achieve sustainability through digital packaging solutions.
Digimarc and Wipak partner to integrate digital watermarks into packaging to optimize recycling.
“If we want producers to buy recyclate instead of continuing to use virgin plastic, we must improve the quality and quantity of plastic output at recycling facilities and offer a real opportunity for closed-loop recycling,” stated Riley McCormack, President and CEO of Digimarc.
How digital watermark works in recycling system?
Digimarc digital watermarks are used to deterministically identify plastic packaging to any desired level of granularity.
It works by linking covert digital watermarks applied to plastic packaging with an extensible cloud-based repository of product attributes, including packaging composition, food or non-food grade plastic, product variant, brand, SKU, and more.
This technology overcomes the limitation of current optical sorting technologies and helps significantly improve the quality and quantity of recycled materials.
Advantages of using digital watermark
Digimarc Recycle generates invaluable novel consumption data and sustainability metrics to revolutionize plastic recycling. The digital watermarks automate the identification of packaging collection and sortation at material recovery facilities and plastic recycling facilities.
Once applied, digital watermarks support product authentication, manufacturing and supply chain inspection, dual-factor customer loyalty programs, next-generation retail checkout, and other enterprise applications, providing accretive value.
The company also offers the option to deploy digital watermarks now and activate them later, which is unlike other data carriers that cannot be turned off once deployed. This allows users to carry out packaging refreshes, regional rollouts, marketing campaigns and other initiatives.
