A great number of plastics applications depend upon black or white pigments as their primary colorant or as a component of their colour formulation, with critical characteristics including tint strength and regulatory clearances. Increasingly, however, users are also exploring sustainability characteristics, which can include the energy required to make the pigment or to use it in a compound as well as whether it can be sorted in expected recycling streams. One of the recent challenges for conventional carbon black pigments, for example, has been around concerns that they absorb near infrared (NIR) wavelengths, interfering with one of the key detection technologies used in automated recycling sorting equipment.

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