New moves are being made to deal with Europe’s growing problem of plastic waste. Much of the low-value waste is going to landfill across the continent, acting as a brake on the European Union’s target of 50% waste recycling by 2020.
Bodies representing the plastics industry in Europe has given its backing to a Green Paper from the European Commission that aims to stop all plastic waste going to landfill. The Green Paper is part of a review of EU waste legislation that is evaluating the current targets for waste recovery and landfill.
The industry bodies – Plastic Recyclers Europe, European Plastic Converters and PlasticsEurope – are already working with the EU on several waste initiatives, including one that recycles low-value mixed plastic waste into usable products.
This EU-funded initiative, the Plastic Recyclate Impression Moulding Engineering (Prime) project, is also looking at more innovative use of plastics – for example, in flood barriers, transport products and in construction. The European Commission has asked companies to tender for a pilot project in which the low-value plastic waste from across the EU can be collected and recycled for use.
Estimates suggest that only 33.6% of all plastic waste generated in Europe is currently recycled. Another 33.2% is used in energy recovery but the rest goes to landfill. Packaging is the biggest problem and makes up 62% of all plastic waste in Europe. While recovery rates are good for packaging, at 66.8% across the EU, nine countries still send more than 50% of their plastic packaging waste to landfill.
The plastics industry has expressed concern that the demand for better use of low-value plastics could have a detrimental effect on the value of plastics recycling by diverting resources away from the products that are most valuable.