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In response to the continued negotiations on the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), EuRIC, representing the recycling trade, urges legislators to guard Europe’s plastics recycling sector and instantly tackle the large imports of plastics labelled as recycled.
Imports of low-cost plastics, each virgin and plastics labelled as recycled, fail to contribute to EU’s circularity objectives. Primarily imported from Asia, these plastics are processed beneath situations that fall in need of EU requirements, with restricted push for circularity of supplies of their house international locations. They’re not produced from EU plastic waste, and the international locations they arrive from haven’t carried out circularity targets just like the EU’s. In consequence, European plastics recycling firms, regardless of having invested a whole lot of thousands and thousands of euros to satisfy circularity objectives, at the moment are compelled to function under their manufacturing capability, with no indicators of restoration in 2024 concerning the costs of recyclates.
Recycled content material targets for plastic packaging have been instrumental in driving demand for recycled plastics and supporting these aims over the past years. EuRIC insists that minimal recycled content material targets for plastic packaging placed on the EU market be met utilizing post-consumer plastic packaging waste collected inside the EU. Provided that this core precept, enshrined within the proposed PPWR, had been to be dropped, it’s important to make sure that imports of plastics labelled as recycled are topic to a correct traceability system to ensure that they originate from recycling and meet minimal situations when it comes to setting, well being, and security. Failing to alleviate the unbalanced stress on recyclers, dangers Europe lacking its legally binding recycling and recycled content material targets, in addition to the chance to develop into the primary carbon impartial continent by 2050.
These proposed measures are additionally a matter of inexperienced industrial coverage. Recycled content material serves as a market sign which has prompted a surge in funding to construct recycling capability in Europe. This aligns with the aims of the brand new Round Economic system Motion Plan, making certain that the EU takes care of its personal plastic waste. Beneath this rationale, the EU has particularly banned exports of plastics waste to non-OECD international locations, beneath the Waste Cargo Regulation. In consequence, plastics waste must be recycled and marketed inside the EU. Leaving European packaging plastics recyclers unprotected in opposition to a surge of plastics’ import from international locations which frequently take pleasure in a lot decrease vitality prices and play by much less stringent guidelines, not solely harms the setting, but in addition inflicts a tragic blow to funding in Europe’s greentech trade.
www.euric.org
Supply: EuRIC (Brussels, February 23, 2024)
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