Plastics Europe’s biennial report shows circular plastics now account for 13.5% in new plastic products manufactured in Europe.

Source: Plastics Europe

This figure means that the European plastics system is said to be halfway towards the interim ambition – initially established in the Plastic Transition roadmap – to use 25% of plastics from circular sources in new products by 2030.

‘The Circular Economy for Plastics: A European Analysis’ provides an overview of European plastics production, conversion, consumption and waste management, as well as an analysis of plastics production from non-fossil sources and recycling technologies.

Overall, the report confirms that the transition towards higher circularity increased significantly between 2018 and 2022.

19.7% of Europe’s total plastics production was circular, 13.2% of which was mechanically recycled post-consumer, 5.4% pre-consumer, 1% bioplastics, and 0.1% chemically recycled.

In total, 26.9% of European plastics waste is now recycled meaning that, for the first time, more plastics waste is recycled than is put into landfill; an important milestone in Europe’s plastics circularity journey.

However, the report’s data also highlights several major challenges that will undermine the Plastics system’s progress towards circularity; including growing rates of incineration with energy recovery (+15% since 2018) of plastics waste needed as circular feedstock/that could have been recycled.

The continent-wide roll-out of chemical recycling, as a complementary solution to mechanical recycling, is essential to meet ambitious mandatory recycled content targets for applications and industries that require high-quality plastics. To incentivise the necessary investments and ramp up the deployment of chemical recycling in Europe we urgently need a green light and clarity from EU policy makers. We need legislative acceptance of chemical recycling and the adoption of a Mass Balance attribution method based on a fuel-use exempt model.

Virginia Janssens, Managing Director of Plastics Europe

To meet the growing demand for plastics manufactured from circular feedstocks, we also need to massively upscale the collection and sorting of post-consumer plastics waste, and increase the availability of biomass and captured carbon.