Every year, millions of metric tons of plastic end up as waste, making plastic pollution one of the world’s major environmental challenges. According to global plastic waste statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), more than 408 million metric tons of plastic waste are currently generated each year, but only about 9% is effectively recycled; the rest ends up incinerated, in landfills, or improperly disposed of in natural ecosystems.
In Chile, the circular economy landscape remains complex: approximately 17 million metric tons of waste are generated annually, and although public interest in recycling and sustainable waste management has been growing, actual recycling rates remain low. For municipal household waste, the recycling rate is below 2%, while the overall Chile recycling rate national average hovers around 13.5%.
In this context, one of the major industrial challenges is not only to recycle plastic and transform it into a secondary product, but also to ensure that the same material can be safely reused for its original purpose.
To address this critical issue, Dr. Eliezer Velásquez, a sustainable materials researcher at the Laben-Chile Center for Innovation in Packaging at the University of Santiago (USACH), is leading a Fondecyt Regular 2026 project that aims to develop new recycled plastics for food packaging, particularly those used for dairy products such as yogurt, ice cream, and desserts.
“The major challenge is not just recycling plastic, but ensuring that the material can be reused for its original purpose. In the case of food packaging, many plastics lose properties such as rigidity and safety when recycled, making it difficult for them to safely come into contact with food again,” explains Dr. Eliezer Velásquez.
Among the packaging materials studied by the project, rigid polystyrene is a major focus due to the technical difficulties involved in reincorporating it into food contact applications after recycling.
“Of the materials we are studying, rigid polystyrene is the most challenging. Recycling it is complex because it is not easy to reprocess in machinery, and when this is achieved, the new material loses fundamental properties such as rigidity, color, and safety in terms of plastic migration into food—properties that are essential for its reuse in food packaging,” adds the USACH packaging researcher.
To address this challenge, the project will work with actual plastic waste from national recycling companies, developing circular economy technologies that allow for the recovery of properties lost during recycling, especially in the context of implementing Chile’s Extended Producer Responsibility Law (Ley REP), which aims to transform the linear economy into a circular one by requiring manufacturers and importers to organize and finance the collection and recycling of the products they sell at the end of their useful life.
“We are working with actual waste collected from post-industrial sites and with domestic packaging companies. Not all recycled plastic from food packaging can be used solely to manufacture pallets or other lower-quality applications; if we want to move toward a true circular economy, we need to develop technologies in the laboratory so that recycled plastic can return to its original application—that is, become part of new food packaging,” says Dr. Eliezer Velásquez.
Building on this, the team will begin by evaluating various factors capable of restoring mechanical properties lost during plastic recycling, such as the material’s tensile strength, stiffness, and structural deformability.
Subsequently, they will study technical alternatives to improve the food contact materials’ safety and reduce the migration of harmful substances into food. Once these formulations are obtained, the recycled materials will be tested using specialized equipment that replicates industrial packaging manufacturing processes, to ultimately analyze critical aspects such as their circular economy recyclability and carbon footprint analysis.
Part of these advanced material evaluations will require highly specialized equipment to move from basic laboratory research to the critical stages of prototyping and material validation. In this context, the environmental initiative benefits from strategic international collaboration with the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food Technology (IATA-CSIC), Carlos III University of Madrid, and the Plastics and Rubber Center (Technion City, Israel). These global institutions will provide high-performance testing capabilities not currently available in Chile, thereby strengthening the potential for industrial application and scaling up the project’s results.
“Today, there is a real need to find alternatives for the plastic waste generated by the food industry. We hope this project will help generate knowledge and technologies that enable the safe increase in the use of recycled materials, thereby assisting both companies and efforts to address the environmental and regulatory challenges facing the country and the world,” concludes Dr. Eliezer Velásquez.