Digital Watermarking invisibly embeds a covert mark into the print or embosses a watermark into plastic trays so that they can be automatically recognised as a aid to automated sortation systems
Digimarc Corporation a supplier of digital watermarking technologies, has released its new Digimarc Recycle sortation software. This technological advancement reduces the cost of Digimarc Recycle-compliant hardware by nearly 50%, significantly lowering the barrier of entry for recycling and waste sortation facilities around the world that are eager to deploy a more sophisticated and much-needed solution.
Digimarc Recycle addresses a critical industry need: it increases the precision and accuracy with which sorting machines can sort recycled material. By identifying digital watermarks on product packaging, the software consistently and accurately determines each item’s composition. Current technologies offer limited sortation parameters and are prone to misidentification, often resulting in cross-contaminated plastic that cannot be close-loop recycled. Next-gen sortation is essential to making a circular plastics economy viable. Digimarc Recycle accurately identifies plastic packaging during sortation, precisely determining the product to enable sorting with any desired level of granularity. This is achieved by linking covert digital watermarks applied to plastic packaging with a cloud-based repository of extensible product attributes—including packaging composition, food or non-food grade plastic, product variant, brand, SKU, and more.
This increase in sortation specificity is achieved using sorting machines that employ cameras and Digimarc Recycle software to detect recycled materials on moving belts. In the latest version of its Recycle sortation software, Digimarc has redesigned its detector operations to work with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) that are increasingly used in AI applications.
Digital watermarking is the only advanced sortation solution capable of accurately detecting and sorting distinct plastic varieties, including food, cosmetic, and hygiene grade plastics. The technology works for all form factors including rigid and flexible packaging. This makes it a more holistic and immediate solution to drive circularity. In addition, the SKU-level, product-variant level, or even item-level specificity that digital watermarking provides is essential for meeting traceability requirements set forth by the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR).