The Additives and Polymer Design Department develops additive and material design-based solutions for circular plastics. Building on our established focus on the circularity of plastics, we optimize recyclates through innovative additive and formulation concepts. This allows secondary materials—even those from short-lived packaging streams—to be upgraded for technically demanding applications and previously difficult-to-use material streams to be converted into robust, usable materials. For elastomers, we develop new recycling strategies and focus on additive and formulation development for durable, reliable products. In addition, we promote the use of biogenic raw materials for additives and polymers. We also advance material design-based concepts such as mono-material solutions and detachable connections to increase recyclability and resource efficiency. Digital methods and AI accelerate our development—from recipe development to polymer design approaches for microelectronics. We use data- and model-based methods to identify correlations between composition, structure, and properties more quickly and to make development cycles more efficient. AI-supported approaches support material and formulation development – from the selection of suitable additive packages to application-oriented optimization. In addition, we are transferring probabilistic failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) to materials in the medium term in order to better understand the causes of failure at the molecular level and derive more robust, durable, and reliable product solutions.