CLARIFY pilot plant opens in Kortrijk: a new step towards high-quality recycling of flexible plastics

The opening was paired with a full-day event that brought together the plastics value chain—from packaging design and collection quality to upscaling advanced recycling technologies—culminating in a tour of the new pilot system. 

The event featured a broad programme of company presentations spanning packaging design, recycling system quality, and upscaling routes—underscoring how circularity is a system challenge that needs collaboration across the chain. Peter Roose, Catalisti president, who spoke from his industrial perspective at Eastman about challenges and opportunities around sustainable innovation in Flanders. Tine Schaerlaekens, director at Catalisti, highlighted how Moonshot Flanders helps connect research, pilots, and industrial roll-out, and shared the impact Moonshot is already delivering—from pilot installations to spin-offs, patents and publications. 

Advanced recycling 

Flexible plastic packaging (think crisps bags, wrappers, and multilayer films) is notoriously difficult to recycle at high value. During the event, Prof. De Meester stressed the importance—and the techno-economic promise—of advanced physical recycling routes for these materials.

CLARIFY, a Moonshot Flanders project supported by VLAIO, focuses on pilot-scale de-inking and de-lamination, separating inks and thin barrier layers (like aluminium) from plastic films so the resulting polymer fraction can be reused as a high-quality feedstock.

As described during the opening, this approach directly targets a key bottleneck: we can increasingly collect and sort these materials, but high-quality recycling has lagged behind. CLARIFY aims to close that gap by enabling cleaner, more reusable polymer outputs—an important step toward real circularity for flexible plastics.

Pilots de-risk scale-up

For the chemical and plastics industry, moving from a promising lab result to an industrially robust process is rarely a straight line. Pilot installations are the essential “bridge”: they allow teams to validate performance on real waste streams, build reliable mass/energy balances, test continuous operation, and uncover operational challenges that only appear at a larger scale. In short: pilots de-risk scale-up and allow industry to verify a technology's viability before committing to demonstration or commercial roll-out.

Moving breakthrough technology closer to industry

CLARIFY is part of Moonshot Flanders’ portfolio of industry-relevant innovation projects of knowledge institutes in Flanders. Moonshot supports breakthrough technologies that help Flemish industry progress toward climate neutrality by insisting on strong collaboration between the knowledge institutes and companies.

With the CLARIFY pilot infrastructure now operational, the ecosystem gains platform to:

• test and improve advanced physical recycling routes on realistic feedstocks,
• generate the operational and economic evidence needed for scale-up,
• and accelerate industrial adoption of circular solutions for challenging plastic streams.

Catalisti looks forward to supporting members and partners in translating these innovations into industrial applications in follow-up innovation projects across the value chain.