In an opinion piece published by regulatory news provider Chemical Watch on March 9, 2020, Director General of the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic), Marco Mensink, discusses how he believes chemical recycling can be used to accelerate safe plastic recycling in the EU.
With the recycling rate of plastics in the EU at just 15%, Mensink writes that increasing this rate should be an urgent priority, especially considering the goals of the new EU Circular Economy Action Plan. Cefic sees chemical recycling as a key tool in supporting with this increase and says the chemical industry’s role is to help scale up the technology to become a viable option for recycling. Specifically, the technology is being viewed as complementary to mechanical recycling with the added ability to recycle mixed plastic wastes and to remove hazardous legacy chemicals from plastic waste streams. Plastics produced from chemically recycled feedstocks should also have the quality as virgin plastics and therefore also be safe for use in sensitive applications such as food packaging and medical equipment.
Source: https://www.foodpackagingforum.org/news/cefic-paper-advocates-for-chemical-recycling.
Read the position paper at the Cefic website: https://cefic.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Cefic-Position-Paper-on-Chemical-Recycling-1.pdf.
