Circular plastics now account for 13.5% of the content in new plastic products manufactured in Europe, according to industry association Plastics Europe (Brussels), said Chemweek.
The association today published its biennial “The Circular Economy for Plastics: A European Analysis” report, which noted that the figure means the European plastics sector is more than halfway toward the interim ambition of Plastics Europe’s Plastics Transition roadmap to use 25% of plastics from circular sources in new products by 2030.
However, the report’s data also highlights several major challenges that Plastics Europe said would undermine the plastics sector’s progress toward circularity. They include growing rates of incineration with energy recovery — up 15% since 2018 — of plastics waste needed as circular feedstock that could have been recycled.
“Whilst the data confirms the shift to circularity is firmly established and picking up pace, it is frustrating that we still incinerate so much plastics waste when this potential feedstock is desperately needed by our industry to accelerate the transition,” said Virginia Janssens, managing director of Plastics Europe. “Without urgent action to increase the availability of all circular feedstocks for plastics we cannot maintain the current rate of progress and realise the ambitions of our Plastics Transition roadmap and the EU Green Deal.”
In total, 26.9% of European plastics waste is now recycled, which means that for the first time, more plastics waste is recycled than is put into landfill; an important milestone in Europe’s plastics circularity journey, the report said. However, to meet the growing demand for plastics manufactured from circular feedstocks, “we need to massively upscale the collection and sorting of post-consumer plastics waste, and increase the availability of biomass and captured carbon,” Plastics Europe said.
The data also highlights that the uptake of circular plastics is not uniform but varies by industry sector. The strongest demand comes from the packaging, building and construction and agriculture sectors. However, others, including automotive and electricals and electronics, are falling behind, the report said.
The report found that in 2022, circular plastics were produced from several sources. The largest source, accounting for 13.2% of all plastics produced, was mechanically recycled, but only 1.0% came from bio-based feedstock and 0.1% was chemically recycled.
“The continent-wide roll-out of chemical recycling, as a complementary solution to mechanical recycling, is essential to meet ambitious mandatory recycled content targets for applications and industries that require high-quality plastics,” Janssens said. “To incentivize the necessary investments and ramp up the deployment of chemical recycling in Europe we urgently need a green light and clarity from EU policy makers. We need legislative acceptance of chemical recycling and the adoption of a mass balance attribution method based on a fuel-use exempt model.”
The report also showed that Europe’s share of global plastics production decreased to 14% in 2022, having been as high as 22% in 2006. “If this continues[,] Europe will become increasingly dependent on imports and its ability to invest in circularity and support the transitions of the many downstream sectors and value chain partners that rely on plastics will be undermined,” Plastics Europe said.
We remind, Companies from across the flexible food packaging supply chain have partnered to launch a new snack packaging that contains 50 percent-recycled plastic and meets stringent food contact requirements. The new packaging was launched in late 2023 in the United Kingdom and Ireland for Sunbites, a snack brand owned by PepsiCo. The packaging is made using an advanced recycling process—a complementary approach to mechanical recycling—that enables the recycled materials to satisfy the demanding European Union regulatory requirements for applications such as food-contact packaging, contact sensitive and medical devices.
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