In December 2019, FEAD, the representative body of the private waste management and resource industry, published the results of its analysis of chemical recycling. Chemical Recycling Europe supports constructive dialogues with regard to chemical recycling and would like to clarify some observations issued in FEAD’s analysis.
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Chemical Recycling Europe calls for waste management collaboration
Chemical Recycling Europe would emphasise that chemical recycling complements other recycling processes. When mechanical recycling is unable to treat the polymer waste, chemical recycling provides a unique opportunity to recycle ‘difficult’ waste streams and convert them to high-quality secondary raw materials.
Chemical Recycling Europe welcomes the FEAD’s conclusion on the definition of recycling, which confirms that the current technology-neutral definition appropriately addresses chemical recycling. In line with the definition, use of the output as fuels automatically falls under the energy recovery level in the waste hierarchy.
Protecting consumer health and the environment is a key strategic goal. To ensure this, Chemical Recycling Europe believes that secondary raw materials leaving the recycling plant should be in compliance with the relevant legal provisions. It is worth mentioning that chemical recycling is more tolerant towards contaminants and thus can treat low quality feedstocks and produce high-quality secondary raw materials to be used even at food contact applications. However, there is lack of alignment between waste and product legislations that needs to be clarified.
The growing demand for chemical recycling output from the global brands and the chemical industry in order to reach the ambitious recycling targets for plastics set by the EU, will require a strong collaboration with the whole plastic value chain to make it a reality. The waste management sector has a key role to play in this chain and Chemical Recycling Europe therefore calls for constructive collaboration to enable the development of new solutions.
