TOMRA Recycling hosted HolyGrail 2.0 event

HolyGrail, led by Procter & Gamble and supported by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, invited stakeholders and partners to another event hold at TOMRA Recycling’s facilities.
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holygrail tomra P&G
After the completion of the first project (HolyGrail) in May, HolyGrail 2.0. was set in place and further investigates in how far digital watermarks embedded in plastic or tracers can contribute to improving the sorting of post-consumer packaging. By means of marking plastic packaging with digital watermarks invisible to the human eye, both the quality and quantity of recycled material can be improved and lead to more plastics being brought back in the loop instead of ending up as waste. Thus, valuable resources are protected.

During the second HolyGrail 2.0. event on October 22nd, about 130 international guests arriving from the K-Show in Düsseldorf were shuttled to TOMRA’s premises to take part in various presentations held by various project members, a Q&A session and a live demonstration.
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Tom Eng, Head of TOMRA Sorting Recycling, opened the event with an introduction to the current resource crises and the need to shift to a circular economy, supported by solutions that TOMRA provides.


Project leader and Principal Scientist at Procter & Gamble Gian de Belder gave an overview on HolyGrail. De Belder got more into detail on the benefits and functioning of digital watermarks in recycling and sorting centers. Following him, Larry Logan reviewed the Digimarc barcode construction and application, explaining how it can be applied to any printed material where a barcode, QR code and Data Matrix may be used.

A demonstration of the functioning of In-Mould-Labels was given by Nico van de Walle, Product & Circular Economy Manager at Verstraete In Mould Labels. By using the Verstraete IML app he showed how interactive packaging can be identified. Applying augmented reality features when scanning the labels added a very lively atmosphere to the presentation.

After having received a lot of input from the theoretical part of the technology, participants were led to the onsite test center for a demonstration of how the digital watermark packaging materials can be recognized with the add-on module installed on the TOMRA sorting machine. Afterwards a dynamic Q&A session rounded off the one-day program.

Looking back, one can record that once again the second HolyGrail event hosted in TOMRA’s headquarter offered valuable networking opportunities and showed TOMRA’s leadership in bringing key players together and helping to move the circular economy forward.