Titled Stay in the cycle, rethinking recycling with PLA bioplastics, it summarizes the current PLA’s recycling market, regulations, and technologies. The white paper provides a comprehensive outlook and vision on how recycling of PLA is viable, economically feasible and can be commonly used as an end-of-life solution for PLA bioplastics. - SPNews

The white paper shows that the ability for PLA to be depolymerized via hydrolysis to recreate the exact same PLA resin, allows it to be a circular material. The new recycled PLA maintains the same quality and food contact approval. Luminy® rPLA grades contain 20% or 30% recycled content from a mix of post-consumer and post-industrial recycled PLA, which is third-party certified by SCS Global Services.

The Luminy® rPLA contributes to meet the ever-increasing EU recycling targets for plastic packaging waste – as outline in the upcoming revision of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (PPWD).

The need for plastics to be reused and recycled responsibly is critical. It comes from the continued pertinence of plastic in daily applications, such as in food hygiene, medical applications, and industrial parts. The white paper provides real life examples, such as bottled water supplier Sansu in South Korea, who by using their existing logistics infrastructure created a system to recover used PLA bottles, which were sent for recycling at the TotalEnergies Corbion recycling plant.

Valorizing PLA waste as a feedstock for either chemical or mechanical recycling is a huge opportunity. Bridging the gap between insufficient current recycling rates and ambitious upcoming EU targets will mean a gradual phasing out of a linear use of plastics through reduction, reuse, recycling, and recovery of materials. Moving away from the use of fossil carbon towards biobased resources is of the utmost importance for plastic production, PLA is created from sustainable, natural resources – with considerable ecological benefits.

Gerrit Gobius du Sart, Corporate Scientist, TotalEnergies Corbion