One of recycling''s biggest blind spots is the crinkly, multi-layered film inside potato chip bags, snack wrappers and ready-meal pouches. These mixed plastic packages, made from several different polymers fused together, are notoriously hard to recycle and almost always end up in landfills or incinerators. A new process from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), published in June 2026, could finally change that — without using a drop of harmful solvent.
The team, working in NTU''s School of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, has demonstrated a technique that uses heat, pressure and mechanical action to cleanly separate the different polymer layers in mixed plastic packaging, then reform them into reusable raw material. Crucially, the process avoids the toxic solvents typically required to dissolve multi-layer films — a long-standing barrier to scaling up "advanced" recycling for this waste stream.
"Mixed plastic packaging has been one of the toughest streams to recycle," the researchers said. "Traditional mechanical recycling can''t handle it because the layers contaminate each other, and chemical methods often rely on solvents that are themselves a pollution problem. We wanted a route that doesn''t trade one waste for another."
The result is a closed-loop system in which the recovered polymers can be remolded into new packaging, films or industrial parts. Initial trials on common multi-layer materials — including PET, polyethylene and polypropylene laminates — showed efficient separation and the recovered plastic retained much of its original quality, an important benchmark for any recycling process aiming to feed back into manufacturing rather than just downcycling into lower-grade products.
Why does this matter? Multi-layer flexible packaging accounts for a large and growing share of consumer plastic waste worldwide. It is lightweight, cheap, and extends food shelf life — but its layered design makes it almost invisible to existing recycling infrastructure. According to industry estimates, less than 5% of flexible food packaging is currently recycled globally. The rest ends up in landfills, in incinerators, or leaks into rivers and oceans.
If a solvent-free process can be scaled up, it could plug one of the biggest leaks in the plastic economy. The NTU team is now working with industry partners on pilot-scale trials, with the goal of demonstrating commercial-scale viability within two to three years. They also see early applications in regions where flexible packaging is widely used but formal recycling capacity is limited.
The work fits into a wider Singapore push to become a "circular economy" hub for Southeast Asia. The city-state has set targets to reduce waste sent to its Semakau landfill by 30% by 2030 and has been investing in research into chemical recycling, food waste conversion, and electronic waste recovery. NTU has been at the center of several of those projects, including earlier breakthroughs on carbon-capturing concrete and battery recycling.
For the global recycling industry, the announcement is one of several recent advances suggesting that the long-standing technical bottleneck around flexible packaging may finally be loosening. Researchers in the UK and the US have reported related progress with different chemical approaches, but a solvent-free method has been seen as the most environmentally elegant — and the most likely to win regulatory approval at scale.
Consumers won''t see the change at the checkout aisle right away. But if the NTU process makes it from lab to industrial line, the bag your chips come in could one day re-enter the economy as a new bag, instead of a permanent addition to the planet''s plastic backlog. That would be a quiet, important shift in how the world handles one of its most stubborn waste problems.
