Summary
To meet the 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. In this respect, Cefic highlights the role of chemical recycling of plastic waste in supporting these objectives. 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 currently being incinerated, landfilled or exported.
To scale up chemical recycling to enable plastic waste to become a valuable resource, the chemical industry is ready to work under the following guiding principles:
- Increase collaboration to bring more valuable recycled content to the market, towards also achieving EU recycling targets.
- Generate and collect data to better understand the environmental performance, benefits, and contributions of chemical recycling.
- Foster transparency and contribute to the development of uniform standards for a chain of custody mass balance approach.
Ensuring investment for scale up, and full deployment of chemical recycling and dissolution recycling requires an enabling policy framework.
Cefic calls for:
- Acceptance of chemical recycling as an integral solution in the definitions and functioning of a circular economy for plastics.
- An enabling policy framework which supports and duly integrates chemical recycling.
- Enabling of investments into the scale-up and further advancement of chemical recycling.