IN Brief:
- InFACT will run from 2026 to 2028 with a €3.2m budget and support from Innovation Fund Denmark’s TRACE programme.
- The project brings together 16 partners across collection, sorting, recycling, packaging production, and food manufacturing.
- The work targets one of Europe’s most difficult packaging streams: recycling flexible food packs back into new packaging.
Nestlé, Interzero, VANA, and 13 other partners have launched InFACT, a project designed to demonstrate circular infrastructure for flexible plastic packaging collected from households.
The project name stands for Infrastructure for the Flexible plastic pAckaging Circular Transition. Running from 2026 to 2028 with a total budget of €3.2m, it is funded by Innovation Fund Denmark through the TRACE programme, which focuses on circular economy work in plastics and textiles.
The consortium brings together organisations from across the value chain, including Nestlé Danmark, BKI foods, Hilton Foods Denmark, Cloetta Danmark, the City of Copenhagen, Interzero, TotalEnergies, Fraunhofer IVV, ARCUS Greencycling Technologies, Re:Lab, Topsoe, Coveris, Dapofa, the University of Southern Denmark, VANA, and the Danish Technological Institute.
Flexible plastic packaging is widely used for products such as coffee, minced meat, crisps, confectionery, and other food formats, yet much of the material is still burned or downcycled rather than returned to packaging use. Soft plastic packaging accounts for nearly half of plastic packaging placed on the European market, while the recycling rate remains below 15%.
The technical difficulty sits inside the pack itself. Flexible food packaging often combines multiple polymer layers, barrier films, adhesives, inks, and sometimes metallised layers. Those structures protect shelf life, aroma, moisture control, fat resistance, and food safety, but they also make conventional mechanical recycling difficult.
InFACT will combine complementary recycling technologies to test whether household-collected soft plastics can be returned to packaging use in a cohesive system. That system will need to handle real collection streams, inconsistent material quality, food residues, multilayer structures, and the strict performance requirements of new packaging applications.
The regulatory backdrop is tightening. The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation entered into force in February 2025 and is increasing expectations around recyclability and recycled-content documentation toward 2030. Food packaging faces particular pressure because performance, safety, and compliance requirements leave less room for experimental material substitution than many non-food categories.
Flexible packaging has retained its position in food because it is efficient. It is lightweight, material-efficient, transport-efficient, and adaptable to portion size, shelf-life requirements, and retailer formats. Replacing it wholesale is neither straightforward nor automatically lower impact. The stronger industrial task is to redesign, collect, sort, and recycle flexible formats without losing the functional value that made them dominant.
Packaging cost and compliance work is already moving in that direction. As businesses use EPR assessments to improve packaging data, recyclability classification, and material choices, infrastructure projects such as InFACT become a necessary counterpart. Food manufacturers can only specify circular packaging routes where collection and recycling systems can supply credible material.
The project also links circular infrastructure with reduced dependence on imported fossil feedstocks. Polymer supply, energy cost, regulation, and retailer packaging commitments are converging, and a circular route for flexible plastic could create a more stable secondary material stream for selected formats.
Commercial success will demand more than proof of technical recyclability. The material must be collected at scale, sorted accurately, processed economically, and converted into packaging that meets functional requirements. It must also address food-contact restrictions, odour, contamination, migration risk, optical quality, sealing behaviour, and consistency across batches.
By linking municipalities, producers, recyclers, packaging businesses, food companies, and research organisations, InFACT avoids treating recycling as a single-machine problem. The model will be tested against the realities of household waste, sorting infrastructure, food-packaging specifications, and converter performance. Those are the conditions that determine whether flexible packaging circularity can move from trial language into industrial practice.
