Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging

Since its inception in 2020, the SSPP Challenge has deployed almost £60m of public funding – and is expected to leverage over £200m of private money – to support bold, ambitious innovation to deliver a step change in the UK’s ability to reduce, reuse and recycle plastic packaging waste.

In March 2023, the SSPP Challenge announced its final tranche of funding for innovation in plastic packaging reduction, reuse and recycling. Hear more about the event and the SSPP Challenge from Challenge Director Paul Davidson. Eight funding competitions have been completed and the Challenge now has a balanced portfolio of over 80 projects.

The Challenge directly supports the 2025 targets in the UK Plastics Pact and takes a collaborative, cross-sector approach, bringing together academia, industry and the third sector to tackle the technical, commercial and behavioural challenges associated with plastic packaging waste.

Examples of SSPP’s cross-sector approach

Enabling Research programme (delivered by NERC)
The SSPP Challenge awarded £8 million in funding for 10 university-led research projects aimed at finding solutions to existing issues with plastic packaging, reducing plastic pollution and unlocking barriers to create fundamental changes in the industry. The universities are working with partners from across the plastics sector to ensure solutions are responding directly to industry needs.

Large-scale demonstrator 2 and business-led R&D projects
The SSPP Challenge awarded £30 million through two funding competitions. The successful projects comprised five large-scale demonstrator projects and 13 business-led research and development projects.

Circular Economy for Flexible Packaging (CEFLEX)
The CEFLEX initiative is a collaboration of over 180 European companies, associations and organisations representing the entire value chain of flexible packaging. CEFLEX aims to make all flexible packaging in Europe circular by 2025 and the £500,000 SSPP Challenge funding is supporting a comprehensive testing programme to underpin CEFLEX’s ‘designing for a circular economy’ guidelines.

FPF FlexCollect
The co-funded £2.9m FPF FlexCollect project is the most extensive pilot for household collection and recycling of flexible plastic packaging ever undertaken in the UK. Working with a number of volunteer local authorities, the project is delivering a series of innovative flexible plastic packaging household collection and recycling pilots that will run through to 2025. It will provide a unique opportunity to build vital understanding and data to inform the collection and recycling of flexible plastic packaging across different geographies, demographics and collection services.

International projects
The SSPP Challenge supported the delivery of the India Plastic Pact. India was the first Asian country to develop a plastics pact of this kind. In autumn 2020 the SSPP Challenge committed £250,000 of funding to enable WRAP to establish the India Plastics Pact, initiate start-up, engage the Indian government, and develop the appropriate targets and priority work streams for India.

UKCPN is the lead collaboration building partner for the SSPP Challenge.