Increasingly efficient recycling of packaging and textiles is necessary to achieve 50% material recycling by 2040, as set out in the 'European Plastics Strategy' In both the packaging industry, and the textile sector, recycling and reuse of waste products is very low (50% and 49% of waste products are incinerated, respectively). This is mainly due to the use of multilayer materials. The use of multilayer materials in the packaging industry has increased significantly in recent years due to their exceptional properties. For instance, multilayer films can combine properties such as oxygen barrier, water vapour permeability, flexibility and abrasion resistance, which was impossible by using monolayer films. However, at the end of their life cycle, these multilayer materials cannot be separated by current industrial recycling technologies, which greatly limits the reuse of these materials. Multilayer materials are also increasingly used in the textile industry, such as a PU coating on textiles to make them waterproof or give them higher mechanical and chemical resistance (e.g. protective clothing, interior textiles...). Coatings must maintain excellent adhesion to the textile to make the product durable, making them difficult to remove. Consequently, coated textiles are considered unusable at the end of their lifetime, even though the coating comprises only a small fraction of the total weight. Because there is currently no technical solution to ensure proper separation between the polymer layers themselves and the polymer layers and the coating layers, most packaging and textiles are usually incinerated or landfilled, which still leaves a high dependency on crude oil and thwarts the move towards a circular economy. Targeted layer separation ("debonding on demand") is currently a very active area of research to ensure better recycling of bonded materials (through the use of tie layers in multilayer packaging) and coated materials (textiles). Unfortunately, no suitable commercial solution is currently available. As a result, further research is needed to properly separate multilayer materials in order to achieve efficient recycling of these materials. 

The overall aim of the project is to develop coated materials and multilayer films that can be specifically separated by means of different triggers, such as light, heat, UV... Debond wants to take an integrated approach here. The focus is not only on separating the different layers, but the development of new smart alternative additives that can be integrated into an interlayer is also taken into account. Furthermore, the interphase with the coating and the textile/plastic product, the design of the entire product, the dismantling process and the recycling process will be optimised.