AIMPLAS, Plastics Technology Centre, will participate in PRS Europe 2026, the leading trade fair for the plastics recycling industry in Europe, taking place on 5 and 6 May at RAI Amsterdam. Present at stand L74, the technology center will use this event to demonstrate how its recycling solutions enable the transformation of complex plastic waste into high-value materials and products.
Image Credit: AIMPLAS
PRS Europe brings together more than 13,000 professionals and over 500 exhibitors from across the recycling value chain each year, making it the ideal setting for AIMPLAS to share with the European industry its advances in recycling technologies and its vision on the challenges posed by the transition towards more circular and sustainable models.
From Waste to Products: Multiple Technological Routes
One of the key messages AIMPLAS will showcase in Amsterdam is that there is no single solution for recycling plastic waste. Depending on the material, its origin, its condition and its application, the most efficient route can vary significantly. To address this, the technology center has developed a comprehensive portfolio of complementary technologies covering:
- Sorting and Identification Methods: NIR technologies, artificial vision, density separation, air flow separation and electrostatic/triboelectric separation to correctly identify and sort the different waste streams.
- Solvent-Based Recycling: use of solvents and supercritical fluids (SCF) to efficiently separate and purify the components of complex multilayer materials.
- Solvolysis and Pyrolysis/Gasification: chemical recycling routes that allow the recovery of monomers, oligomers or the conversion of waste into fuels and other value-added products such as fibers.
- Enzymatic Recycling: an innovative solution especially applied to polycondensation polymers such as PET or bioplastics like PLA, which harnesses the action of enzymes to trigger controlled and efficient degradation with substance recovery or layer separation.
- De-Crosslinking: recovery of crosslinked materials such as XPE, rubbers and elastomers like EVA that until now were difficult to recycle.
- Upcycling: transformation of plastic waste into materials for high value-added applications.
- Process Simulation: techno-economic analysis that allows evaluating the industrial viability of each route before scaling it up and supporting decision-making on a given waste stream.
These technologies are applied to waste from sectors as varied as automotive, packaging, textiles, construction, renewable energy, electrical and electronic equipment, sports and leisure, and marine litter, demonstrating the versatility and breadth of AIMPLAS’s research lines.
All of this is developed under the SSbD (Safe and Sustainable by Design) methodology, which integrates life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle costing (LCC), social life cycle assessment (sLCA) and health and safety evaluation (H&S), ensuring that every solution is technically, economically and environmentally competitive.
Participation in the Technical Program
In addition to its presence as an exhibitor, AIMPLAS will take an active part in the PRS Europe 2026 technical program. Vanessa Gutiérrez Aragonés, mechanical recycling researcher at AIMPLAS, will present on Tuesday 5 May from 12:45 to 13:30 h at Conference Theater One, within the session “Future-Proof Design: Navigating the Recyclability Targets”, with a presentation entitled “Backstage of recyclability testing: scientific aspects and key results”, in which she will address the scientific aspects and key results of recyclability testing from AIMPLAS’s technical perspective.