Digimarc’s Role in Fighting Plastic Pollution

Digimarc (NASDAQ: DMRC) is the pioneer and global leader in digital watermarking technologies.
Digimarc excels in supporting companies progressing in their digital transformation journey where the identification or the authentication of physical and digital items is critical.
Our digital watermarking technology has been deployed, often at massive scale, where other methods of identification or authentication don’t work well or don’t work at all.

Digimarc Recycle represents a revolution in the sortation, and thus recycling, of plastic waste.
By linking covert digital watermarks (used to deterministically identify plastic packaging to any desired level of granularity) with an extensible cloud-based repository of product attributes (such as brand, SKU, product variant, packaging composition, food/non-food use, etc.), Digimarc Recycle overcomes the limitations of today’s optical sorting technologies to drive a step-change improvement in the quality and quantity of recyclate.
Higher quality plastics recycling is one of the most impactful ways to reduce carbon emissions, comes at a negative cost, and of course, it also reduces plastic pollution. A true win-win-win.
Beyond just immediately improving the quantity and quality of available recyclate, Digimarc digital watermarking also generates a massively valuable by-product: never-before-seen data about the plastics waste stream itself.
Data is essential to solve problems as large and complex as plastic pollution because data not only helps solve known problems efficiently, but it also allows the discovery of solutions to problems not even known to exist.
Already the industry has envisioned multiple ways to mine this data, such as:
- more efficient, effective, and fair Extende Producer Responsibility schemes;
- more sustainable packaging design;
- and reduced packaging volume via the discovery of actual shelf-life requirements.

Watermarking plastic packaging provides the means to achieve a powerful, proven, and economically viable solution to the plastic waste crisis.
The time is now. If we don’t reduce our current rate of carbon emissions, we will cease to have an inhabitable planet, and thus cease to exist.