L’Oréal joins Nextek’s Nextloopp initiative to drive circular economy in personal care packaging

FRANCE – French personal care company, L’Oréal has become the latest addition to Nextek’s Nextloopp initiative with an aim to drive a circular economy in personal care packaging.

L’Oréal joins Unilever, Ineos, Lyondellbasell, PFF Group and others, to “boost the circular pathway for food-grade rPP packaging.”

“We have been working for many years to develop packaging made from high-quality post-consumer recycled polymers,” says Delphine Trillat, materials science domain leader at L’Oréal.

“Today, we are pleased to join the Nextloopp project team in order to join efforts and boost the circular pathway for food-grade rPP packaging, with such a promising technology for the years to come.”

Launched in October 2020, Nextek’s Nextloopp aims to create food-grade PPristine and “INRT” recycled polypropylene (rPP) from post-consumer packaging.

INRT is a high-quality polymer that has been developed specifically for packaging that requires no odor and has no migration challenges, Nextloopp says.

Edward Kosior, founder and CEO of Nextek and Nextloopp explains that  Nextloopp’s INRT-grade resin is poised to offer the personal care packaging sector a world-first – rPP resin with no odor and no migration challenges developed specifically for high-performance packaging.

The initiative’s technology can identify and sort any number of packaging variants from shower gel bottles to yogurt pots in any plastic-type.

It uses a combination of technologies to first separate food-grade PP from other materials, followed by decontamination of the polymer to ensure compliance with food-grade standards in the UK, EU and US.

L’Oréal’s partnership with Nextloopp is in line with its environmental sustainability efforts to reach carbon neutrality at all sites by 2025 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions (scopes 1, 2 and 3) by 50% on average per finished product by 2030.

Additionally, L’Oréal for the Future, launched in 2020, focused on streamlining operations within “planetary boundaries” while addressing urgent environmental and social issues.

Professor Edward Kosior, concludes: “With L’Oréal joining our dynamic project, we believe we have an excellent balance of expertise to drive our ground-breaking project forward.

“Thanks to L’Oréal’s long-term commitment to sustainable packaging, it is the ideal participant to trial our high purity recycled polypropylene resins. We look forward to closing the PP loop with them.”

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