Respack: Technologists urge for a shift from raw recycling to precision upcycling

"We aren’t serious enough about plastic waste," Prof SP Naik, advisor of polymers and plastics and former director general of CIPET/DCPC under the Government of India, opened his address at Respack 2026 with this blunt statement. Naik bypassed prevalent superficial green rhetoric to address the operational and mechanical realities of managing India's massive polymer footprint. 

Speaking to a packed hall of consumer goods leaders, technologists and global equipment manufacturers at The Lalit in Mumbai, a panel led by Naik delivered a unified challenge to standard industry practices: traditional downgrading recycling models are no longer sufficient to meet legal obligations, and the domestic market must transition entirely to high-purity upcycling loops.  

Confronting policy loopholes and the enforcement gap
Naik argued that the widespread reliance on basic mechanical recycling fails the fundamental requirements of true circularity. It simply downgrades polymers across successive generations without creating a closed loop. "With mechanical recycling, a closed loop is not possible because the polymer does not become a monomer and go back to the cracker," Naik explained. "Instead, it just degrades from the first stage to the second, third and fourth generations. This is the fundamental problem."  

The challenge escalates sharply with food-grade recycled plastics. Naik, who recently chaired an expert committee investigating the structural deficits of domestic raw inputs and traceability, warned that while companies aggressively market "super clean recycling," they routinely ignore the structured categories mandated in government notifications, such as melt, paste and enhanced chemical recycling. With over 50,000 chemicals present in plastics—a quarter of which carry high contamination risks—failing to institute strict geotagged input controls for food-grade rPET will trigger severe safety hazards.  

However, Naik highlighted a major regulatory turning point: a decisive Supreme Court order that marks a structural shift in India's waste governance. By moving enforcement powers away from resource-strapped local municipalities directly to district collectors and chief secretaries, the law introduces severe legal weight to compliance. "Now, we cannot escape," Naik emphasised. "With forced segregation, digital monitoring and strict bulk waste generation obligations, we will finally bridge the gap between policy and enforcement. Once there is enforcement, everyone will fall into line."  

The human side of circular collection
While state policies tighten, the commercial viability of upcycling relies entirely on the primary collection matrix. Indroneel Goho, president and CEO of Magpet Polymers Private Limited, shifted the panel’s focus to the human and social dependencies of the Indian recycling supply chain.  
Goho introduced Magpet’s identity as India's first dedicated PET circular enterprise, currently developing the country's largest integrated food-grade rPET recycling facility in Kharagpur. The venture is designed around a continuous, closed-loop model that actively addresses the deep socio-economic issues of informal waste pickers.  

"Sustainability cannot be built on exploitation," Goho remarked bluntly, pointing to comprehensive data metrics from his company's five-year supply-side study. The statistics paint a stark picture of the unsung heroes backing the industry: 60 per cent of waste pickers are women, 57 per cent belong to marginalised classes, and the vast majority operate entirely outside the mainstream financial and healthcare systems, with 67 per cent lacking basic bank accounts and only 4 per cent holding valid birth certificates or health cards.  

To formalise this critical backend, Magpet has deployed six-foot-tall custom smart bins equipped with infrared (IR) sensors across major residential hubs and educational institutions, including a highly successful pilot model at Calcutta International School. The automated system tracks fill levels, prevents external littering, and automatically notifies assigned waste pickers via text message when a bin requires collection. By bypassing predatory aggregators and paying waste pickers directly, the system has successfully augmented household incomes up to 120,000 rupees.  

"In India, adult behaviour can be changed by children," Goho noted, detailing how a gamified "Eco-Yuva" internship and award incentive scheme inside schools triggered a massive wave of student-led household collection. Goho announced that Magpet is currently scaling this data-driven framework by deploying 75 smart bins across Guwahati in collaboration with the Assam Pollution Control Board to declare Guwahati India’s first plastic-neutral city.  

High-precision optical sorting 
The critical transition from raw collection to high-purity upcycling requires advanced machine-led sorting at the front end. Makarand Mandke, managing director of Sesotec India Private Limited, detailed the role of sensor-based technology in safeguarding production lines and satisfying strict food-safety guidelines.  

Mandke explained that undetected metallic particles or mismatched polymers inside a batch of flakes can heavily damage extrusion moulds, halt plant operations, and destroy the functional quality of the final resin. To prevent this, Sesotec’s sorting machinery combines high-resolution color cameras capable of identifying over 17 million reachable colors with advanced hyperspectral near-infrared (NIR) sensors operating across a spectrum of 1200 to 1800 nanometers.  

This sensor matrix captures highly dense data at a resolution of 260 pixels per millimetre, executing real-time object detection that differentiates between subtle polymer variances that are completely invisible to the human eye. "We can easily distinguish between single-layer materials and multi-layer or laminated plastics," Mandke stated, adding that the systems isolate polyolefins from surface contaminants, labels, and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) fractions at high processing speeds ranging from 1 to 8 tonnes per hour.  

Addressing future commercial demands, Mandke pointed to emerging European packaging regulations requiring contact-sensitive packaging to integrate 30 to 50 per cent recycled content by 2030—a legislative shift that will inevitably reshape Indian export mandates. To meet this quality surge, Sesotec has deployed artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to successfully differentiate food-grade PET bottles from cosmetic or toilet-use containers. Recyclers can also utilise Sesotec’s specialised flake analyser to process a 100-gram sample and generate a comprehensive quality composition report within two minutes, replacing slow, day-long laboratory testing cycles.  

Halting molecular degradation
The final mechanical stage of the upcycling sequence involves engineering the material properties of the polymer melt. Ahmed Saleh, team leader of sales recycling at Germany's Coperion GmbH, broke down the advanced compounding and twin-screw extrusion architectures required to process post-consumer flakes into food-contact resins certified under the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).  

Saleh explained that a central roadblock in mechanical recycling is the severe molecular degradation that occurs when polymers undergo extended heat exposure. Traditional single-screw extruders feature prolonged residence times that break down polymer chains, causing severe yellowing and structural embrittlement.  

Coperion resolves this by utilising a co-rotating twin-screw technology that relies on mechanical shear forces rather than high external heat to melt the material. By actively changing the polymer surfaces through the intermeshing screw design, the system cuts total residence time down to a brief 20 to 40 seconds, drastically minimising thermal degradation and saving substantial energy. "Lower residence time means lower degradation, which results in significantly less yellowing in materials like PET," Saleh explained.  

Furthermore, to manage the persistent moisture and volatile organic compounds trapped inside post-consumer flakes, Coperion’s modular machine line integrates an "Ecolift" fluid drive system that utilises hot air to flatten input surface moisture fluctuations down to a stable 0.5 per cent. This is coupled with multi-barrel high-vacuum degassing zones that extract deep chemical impurities and volatile elements without dropping the intrinsic viscosity (IV) of the PET matrix.  

By marrying Coperion’s high-efficiency twin-screw compounding lines with Polymetrix solid-state polycondensation (SSP) reactors, the integrated lines generate clean rPET pellets that comfortably exceed EFSA decontamination limits. Saleh concluded by stating that Coperion's high-capacity lines are fully prepared to scale up to 45,000 tonnes annually on a single system, providing the high-volume backend infrastructure necessary to turn India’s upcycling ambitions into a highly profitable industrial reality.