In April 2021, Montgomery Jaritz and Benedikt Heuer founded the start-up IonKraft, whose technology is to be used in plant engineering: Using plasma technology, the company aims to make plastic packaging for barrier applications in the chemical industry recyclable and thus replace multi-material solutions.
The core of the venture is the development and production of a reactor that coats plastic packaging and provides it with a chemically resistant barrier function. The plasma layers applied using the newly designed reactor create a strong migration barrier, for example for solvents. The advantage of layers applied using plasma technology is that they can be applied very thinly to monomaterials and do not impair the recyclability of the packaging. The plasma reactor developed by IonKraft should be able to coat containers from the inside as well as the outside. A coating on both sides can thus serve as an odor barrier, for example, which traps the bad smell of recyclates. If an odor barrier is created by plasma coating, the range of applications for recyclates can in principle be extended and the plastics cycle can be closed at a further point.
