Post-Industrial and Post-Consumer Recycled Material
SR&ED Opportunities in the Plastics Industry
Written by:
Matthew Wilson, Technical Writer.
Consumer interest in recycling is at an all-time high. This is good news for the plastics industry, which has worked to develop technologies for processing post-consumer and post-industrial material since the 1970s. In the “closed-loop” recycling approach, materials are mechanically reprocessed into products with like properties, reducing virgin material consumption, oil consumption, carbon monoxide emissions, and waste. However, the use of recycled material presents its share of technical problems.
As plastic industry professionals are aware, most different types of plastic are incompatible with each other at the molecular level and require different kinds of processing. This means it is not usually possible to add recovered plastic to virgin polymer without negatively impacting mechanical properties, such as impact strength, or aesthetic properties, such as colour and clarity. While the actual introduction of recycled plastics to a production process isn’t SR&ED-eligible work, activities performed to overcome issues that arise because of these process changes may be SR&ED eligible.
The contamination of recycled material with the paper, pigments, metals, inks, and adhesives used in plastic packaging may cause the material to behave in undesirable ways. For example, the presence of residual metal oxides in a recycled polymer may inhibit pigment blending. This means the polymer constituent must be effectively separated from these and other sources of contamination and protected from degradation during reprocessing and subsequent use. Where separation is not possible, formulas may have to be modified to accommodate the presence of these elements. The additional testing and process variation required can lead to additional labour and materials costs, and because these activities are non-routine procedures, they can be offset through SR&ED tax credits.
Activities performed to overcome issues that arise in the introduction of recycled material to production processes provide just one example of work in the plastics industry that can qualify for the SR&ED program. Recognizing the SR&ED potential of these activities is essential to enabling business growth and innovation.
