The Alliance to End Plastic Waste publishes its ‘The Quest for Quality: Scaling Advanced Mechanical Recycling to Meet Recycled Content Targets for Flexibles’ report, providing a technical and economic assessment of a 50,000-tonne-per-year advanced mechanical recycling plant for flexible plastics. The report outlines how high-quality recyclates can be produced using post-consumer household flexible plastics and goes on to identify the conditions required to commercially scale these solutions.
Alliance to End Plastic Waste
Alliance to End Plastic Waste publishes its report on produce high-quality film from household flexible plastic waste
Additionally, the report highlights the importance of systemic enablers, including robust Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes, mandated recycled content targets, and concessionary capital, alongside a market-driven approach. Industry stakeholders can also find open-source resources that support the development of advanced mechanical recycling capabilities for producing premium recyclates from flexible plastic waste streams.
Brands, retailers, and packaging producers are preparing for the EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) that mandates 35% post-consumer recycled content in non-food packaging by 2030. Flexible plastic packaging is one of the most difficult packaging formats to recycle into high-value applications.
Key findings from the report:
- Advanced mechanical recycling can deliver high-quality outputs: Post-consumer household flexibles can be processed into recyclates suitable for 30%+ use in demanding film applications like shrink films, labels, and pouches.
- Chemical recycling will be complementary to advanced mechanical recycling: As both can produce high-quality recyclates but focus on different fractions of the flexible waste stream and target different applications.
- Achieving high-quality recyclates shifts operational philosophy: Recyclers must deprioritise traditional low-cost, mixed commodity processing and adopt a 'market-pull' approach focusing on producing premium recyclates that meet converter and brand requirements.
- Systemic enablers remain vital for the business case: To bridge the economic gap between high-quality recycling and virgin polymers, companies must leverage enablers like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies to fund collection and sorting, mandated recycled content targets to increase demand, and access concessionary capital to reduce costs.
- Optimise capital via brownfield expansion and upstream sorting: Greenfield civil works (31% of CAPEX) and complex sorting equipment (25%) strain project economics. To create a viable business case, operators should leverage brownfield site upgrades and shift the heavy sorting burden upstream to centralised Plastics Recovery Facilities (PRFs).
“Flexible plastic packaging is one of the most challenging packaging formats to recycle at scale, but it is also one of the most important to get right. The technology needed to produce high-quality recyclates already exists. The challenge now is scaling these solutions commercially through stronger alignment across the value chain, supported by the policy and financial enablers needed to unlock investment. At the Alliance, our role is to bring together stakeholders and accelerate the adoption of scalable solutions. The Quest for Quality is an important step in that effort, providing practical insights to help advance circularity for flexible plastics,” said Jacob Duer, President and CEO of Alliance to End Plastic Waste.