Beyond the environmental benefits, managing and recycling plastic waste could also help Europe secure supply, build resilience, and strengthen industrial capacity.
Per Sigaard Christensen (PhD), business manager at the Danish Technological Institute, explains how pairing ambitious regulation with long-term capital and incentives could turn circular packaging projects into permanent infrastructure.
We need to begin talking about plastics recycling and waste management as strategic infrastructure. Not in the same immediate sense as electricity, drinking water or hospitals. But if Europe wants industrial resilience, then the systems that keep materials in circulation must be treated as more than an environmental service. They are part of the material backbone that food producers, healthcare suppliers, retailers and manufacturers increasingly depend on.
Plastic packaging is often treated as a problem in itself. And indeed, there are problems with plastic waste. But packaging also performs a function that we sometimes forget. It protects food, reduces food waste, keeps medicine sterile and ensures that products arrive safely.
My own daughter’s asthma inhaler is plastic. So are insulin pens and lots of other medical products that people depend on every day: protective equipment, aprons, tubes, scopes, sterile components, and the safe packaging around many of these products.
So the question is not whether we can live without plastics tomorrow. We cannot. The question is whether Europe can become better at keeping these materials in circulation, instead of depending on virgin polymers and long global supply chains.
If geopolitical instability, trade barriers or volatile raw-material markets make virgin materials harder or more expensive to access, then recycling is no longer just an environmental issue. It becomes central to Europe’s strategic autonomy and supply security agenda. Just as Europe recognizes energy grids and critical raw materials as pillars of resilience, circular polymer flows must be viewed through the same strategic lens.
This is why the entry into application of the European Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) marks a decisive shift. It moves the agenda from voluntary ambition to binding market reality by mandating recycled content across packaging categories from 2030: 30% for contact-sensitive PET and single-use PET beverage bottles, 10% for contact-sensitive plastic packaging other than PET, and 35% for other plastic packaging.
PPWR matters because the market and capital investments need certainty. Mandated recycled content and clear harmonized rules on mass-balance accounting principles for chemical recycling are a critical step to give technology innovators and recyclers the regulatory certainty required to unlock large-scale industrial investment. Without predictable rules, the market will simply wait – and waiting is exactly what Europe cannot afford.
But legislation does not build the infrastructure by itself. The targets only work if we can actually collect, sort, recycle and redesign packaging in a way that works commercially. That requires the whole value chain to be involved. Municipalities, waste companies, sorters, recyclers, packaging producers, brand owners and retailers must all move together.
This is what we are working to demonstrate in two Danish-led value-chain projects coordinated by the Danish Technological Institute. InFACT works with flexible plastic food packaging: coffee bags, crisp packets, confectionery wrappers, flow-packs and other types of soft packaging that are found in large amounts in household waste. Today, only around 14% of this fraction is recycled. Recycling it is technically difficult because the materials are often multilayered, contaminated or not designed for recycling.
The project brings together Copenhagen Municipality, sorting expertise, chemical recyclers, packaging producers and international brands such as Nestlé, Hilton Foods, and Cloetta. The aim is to show a full chain where household-collected flexible plastic packaging can be turned into new food-grade packaging with 30–35% recycled content at commercial scale.
The sister project CRISP, with partners such as Amcor, Nestlé and Arla Foods, addresses rigid plastic packaging from the same supermarket basket. Its aim is also to recycle into food-grade plastic, and again, the decisive factor is not one technology alone, but the ability to connect design, collection, sorting, recycling and demand.
Together, the two projects cover much of what consumers meet every day in retail. And more importantly, they both show that companies need one another in order to succeed in recycling complex plastic fractions.
A brand owner cannot use recycled content if there is no consistent supply and material quality. A recycler cannot invest if the sorted input material is too poor. A sorting facility cannot sort it for recycling if it is not incorporated into the packaging design. And most importantly, the economic incentives need to be in place for sorting, recycling and marketing products with recycled content.
The business case only becomes viable when the system is connected, and we acknowledge that the success of our own business sometimes requires us to take responsibility for our closest suppliers, customers and value chain partners’ business.
Europe’s competitors are already treating material security, recycling capacity and circular production as strategic industrial questions. Europe does not need to copy other political systems, and it should not compromise on climate standards, competition rules or transparency. But it does need to match its regulatory ambition with the investment conditions required to build capacity.
That means long-term capital, predictable demand and incentives that make circular infrastructure bankable within European rules. If we set binding recycled content targets without helping the value chain build the capacity to deliver them, we risk creating demand without supply. Demonstration projects such as InFACT and CRISP should not remain isolated projects. They should become stepping stones towards a permanent recycling infrastructure.
If we treat plastic recycling as strategic infrastructure, we need to regulate, fund and scale it accordingly. Packaging is the obvious place to prove that Europe can build a system that is circular, competitive and resilient.
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