Digital Watermarks Initiative Moves to Pilot Market Phase in France

Following successful semi-industrial trials of digital watermarking technology, the Holy Grail 2.0 initiative will be moved forward to a pilot market phase. Operators in France are being invited to participate. The technology will be tested for rejection, ejection, and purity.

Digimarc technology uses digital watermarks that can be incorporated into product packaging. The watermarks are machine readable but undetectable to humans. The watermarks are linked to a cloud-based repository of product attributes like sku, composition, etc. By identifying the material to sorting systems, the technology can help improve the purity of post-consumer recycling streams. The database can also be used to provide consumers with disposal instructions specific to the material and location.

Last year, test results showed that showed that Digimarc’s technology achieved a 99% average detection rate across all tested categories of plastic packaging. The effectiveness of Digimarc Recycle has also been validated in Canada with a 99% detection rate in a pilot with the Circular Plastics Taskforce.

France has been chosen as the pilot market for multiple reasons, including support from CITEO, a French producer responsibility organization , ambitious legislative recycling objectives, and French members have been involved in HolyGrail 2.0 since the start of the project.