Enabling sustainability
Virginia Janssens, Managing Director, Plastics Europe, explains why technology and transparency are key to a circular economy.
When considering the ongoing UK legislative discussions and technical talks on the plastic packaging tax and recycled content exemptions, an enabling framework to boost chemical recycling through mass balance chain of custody models is crucial.
Complementary to mechanical recycling, chemical recycling will be a key part of the solution – to not only reach the high levels of future recycled content in plastic packaging, but to contribute to the UK’s transition to climate neutrality and the circular economy. This latter technology is extremely valuable for applications such as food contact or for processing hard to recycle or contaminated plastic waste.
At Plastics Europe, our ambition is to achieve climate-neutrality by 2050 and accelerate plastics’ circularity. I’m excited about the tremendous change our industry has been going through in the last couple of years. We strive to continue to contribute to the EU’s sustainability ambitions through all the plastics applications which help accelerate decarbonisation across different sectors and by improving the carbon impact of our own production processes. Plastics Europe has recently called for a 2030 30 per cent EU mandatory recycled content target for plastics packaging to speed up its circularity journey. Such an ambitious objective cannot be achieved alone. As such, it is fundamental that we work hand-in-hand with the value chain and policy makers on how to turn this aim into reality. Although more still needs to be done, we have made a lot of progress to come up with solutions that will get us to where we want to be. Our members have planned €7.2bn of investments in chemical recycling by 2030, which translates into being able to deliver around 3.4 Mt of high-quality recycled content by the end of this decade.
Just like operating in a strong EU Single Market is crucial, an enabling and harmonised policy framework at national level is required to allow the industry to scale up and be successful by maintaining its global competitiveness. This requires leveraging the technologies and systems that empower our transition – from separate collection and sorting to all recycling technologies and recognition of mass balance.
The transformation of our industry has also become visible through the rebranding of our association, which reflects the relentless evolution and adaptation of our material to continue enabling a sustainable future. We want our industry to have a positive environmental and societal impact. We look forward to engaging with all relevant stakeholders to deliver a low-carbon circular economy for plastics. Discover our #ChangingPlasticsForGood campaign which showcases circularity and climate-friendly stories of our members’ employees working every day to find answers to some of society’s biggest challenges.