Meet the Innovator behind the P&G Purifier of Water

Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

In 1999, Phil Souter invented the technology that cleans dirty water. His innovation has helped the P&G Children's Safe Drinking Water Program and its partners provide billions of liters of clean water across 100+ countries.

Meet the Innovator behind the P&G Purifier of Water | P&G

$How P&G Designs for Circularity: FlexLoop, Verso Vita and Recycling P&G Packaging Sustainability Expert Gian Debelder traces the full circularity journey – from sorting blue bags at home in Belgium to a cutting-edge sorting facility and the future polypropylene plant at the Port of Antwerp. This is what Ambition 2030 looks like in practice: not a target on paper, but partnership, technology, and design working together to close the loop on plastic. Featuring: • Gian De Belder, Packaging Sustainability Expert – P&G • Inge De Backer, Corporate Communications Director Europe – P&G • Liesbeth Gommers (Indaver), Sorting Facility Expert – Belgium • Wiebe Schipper(PureCycle), VP Operations Europe & Asia Belgium is one of the world’s leading plastic sorting nations, and that track record shapes how P&G thinks about packaging design. At the Indaver facility, 75,000 tonnes of PMD waste from approximately 3 million households are sorted every year into 16 high-purity material fractions. This shows how everyday actions connect to industrial recycling systems, where impact is created through collaboration across the value chain. P&G’s packaging relies on four main plastics: HDPE for bottles, PP for caps, LDPE for film applications, and recycled HDPE where it can already be deployed at scale. In Europe, Head & Shoulders bottles already contain 100% recycled HDPE – a proof point that circularity is a current reality, not just a 2030 target. For film applications, switching from multi-material pouches to mono-material LDPE makes sorting significantly cleaner, because what goes in matters as much as what comes out. Two proprietary technologies are pushing the boundary further. FlexLoop uses a mechanical solvent extraction process to remove printing inks from LDPE film, producing clean flakes suitable for contact-sensitive applications – closing the loop on a material stream that standard mechanical recycling cannot handle. Verso Vita, licensed to PureCycle, dissolves polypropylene from household waste to recover a polymer pure enough to go back into transparent caps. PureCycle’s first European PP recycling plant, built on Verso Vita, is now in development at the NextGen district in the Port of Antwerp. Together, these technologies and partnerships show that circular packaging is not a single solution but a connected system. Therefore, turning waste into value requires collaboration between households, sorting facilities, technology partners, and product design teams working toward the same goal. This episode of Stories on the Move show designing for circularity at its best: that is what P&G’s Ambition 2030 is built on. What you’ll learn: • How plastic packaging is sorted and recycled in Belgium • How P&G designs packaging for recyclability • How Flexloop removes contamination from plastic films • How VersoVita enables high-quality polypropylene recycling • How collaboration enables circular packaging systems Chapters: 00:00 How P&G Recycles Plastic: Flexloop Introduction 00:18 Stories on the Move: Meet Gian De Belder 00:46 Household Recycling: Belgian Blue Bag System 01:34 Sorting Centers: Indaver Material Streams 01:55 Packaging Materials: PE, PP, PET Explained 02:35 Indaver Facility: 75,000 Tonnes Sorted Annually 03:21 P&G Goals: 100% Recyclable Packaging Ambition 2030 03:47 Mono-Material Design: LDPE Pouch Example 04:30 Flexloop Technology: Removing Ink and Contamination 05:15 VersoVita Technology: Dissolution Recycling Explained 06:05 PureCycle Plant: Antwerp NextGen District 06:33 Polypropylene Recycling: From Waste to New Caps 07:55 Circular Packaging: Closing the Loop #PGSustainability #StoriesOnTheMove #CircularEconomy #PlasticRecycling #Recycling #Circularity$

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