The REFLEX project—a collaborative R&D program co-funded by Innovate UK— commenced in October 2014 with Axion Consulting as project leader alongside consortium partners Amcor, Dow Chemical Company, Interflex Group, Nestlé UK, SUEZ, TOMRA Sorting, and Unilever. The two-year program targeted technical barriers to mechanically recycling post-consumer flexible plastic packaging in the UK waste stream.
Innovate UK provided approximately £917,000 in funding toward the project, which aimed to improve flexible packaging design and recyclability while investigating collection, sorting, and reprocessing pathways for polyolefinic films, pouches, and wrappers that previously routed predominantly to landfill or energy recovery.
Project objectives included evaluating near-infrared sorting enhancements, digital watermarking concepts compatible with mechanical recycling, and design-for-recycling guidelines for packaging technologists, brand owners, retailers, and converters seeking structures recoverable through existing and planned UK reprocessing infrastructure.
At launch, UK flexible plastic packaging landfill volumes were estimated at approximately 556,000 tons annually—a scale that justified value-chain collaboration beyond individual company lightweighting initiatives. REFLEX represented the first major Innovate UK-backed program assembling polymer suppliers, converters, brands, waste managers, and sorting technology providers on a unified flexible film recycling roadmap.
Converters supplying UK retail chains during 2014 began receiving forward-looking questionnaire items about mono-material PE compatibility and NIR-sortable inks—documentation requests that traced directly to REFLEX design guidelines under development for eventual European validation and industry release.