Chemical recycling: Enabling plastic waste to become a valuable resource

On the evening of Thursday 31 March 2022 RSC Belgium members and friends enjoyed a highly informative talk on 'Chemical recycling: Enabling plastic waste to become a valuable resource' with Henk Pool from Cefic – the European Chemical Industries Association.

“Every year, Europeans generate 25 million tonnes of plastic waste, but less than 30% is collected for recycling” states the 2018 European Plastics Strategy. Henk showed us how EU regulation and chemical innovation is ensuring that recycling and reuse can minimise waste and build a circular economy for plastics in Europe.

EU initiatives

The EU Green Deal is at the heart of the EU’s ambitions of becoming a climate-neutral continent. To meet these ambitious European objectives, much more plastic waste needs to be collected, sorted and prepared for recycling and a broader range of markets need to be supplied with plastic products containing recycled content.

The European ambition to transition from a linear economy towards a sustainable circular economy calls for an array of complementary innovative recycling solutions and business models. Chemical recycling enables the production of chemicals including plastics from End-of-Life plastic waste streams that are currently incinerated, placed in landfill or exported.

Over the last decades, recycling of plastics has been mostly limited to plastic waste streams which were relatively easy to collect and recycle through mechanical recycling. For packaging this led to overall plastic recycling rate of 41%. Yet still today, a large part of plastic waste ends up in landfill or incineration.

Chemical innovation

To further increase plastic recycling, other and complementary recycling routes will be required to process plastics that are difficult to be handled in mechanical recycling processes. Chemical recycling can therefore fill a void in the plastics recycling loop, conserve valuable resources, and contribute to the creation of a low-carbon circular economy.

Chemical recycling technologies allow the use of plastic waste as feedstock for the chemical industry and replace fossil feedstock materials to produce new chemicals including plastics. Chemical recycling can upgrade the quality and produce secondary feedstock materials that are equivalent to virgin resources. Chemical recycling also has the potential to remove undesired additives and impurities allowing the use as recycled content in high-demanding applications such as food contact materials or medical applications.

During the webinar Henk clarified the different recycling options and routes for plastic waste; took us through the EU policy framework and its developments; and discussed the progress made and the need for further collaboration in technology development, value chain – market developments, and policy development to hit the EU’s ambitious targets.

More information

You can access the slides that Henk presented here and much more information on initiatives in this area can be found on Cefic’s Chemical Recycling Website.