The Alliance to End Plastic Waste has published a report today outlining the technical and economic requirements of a 50,000-tonne-per-year advanced mechanical recycling plant for flexible plastics, identifying the conditions needed for commercial scaling.
Titled ‘The Quest for Quality: Scaling Advanced Mechanical Recycling to Meet Recycled Content Targets for Flexibles’, the report demonstrates how high-quality recyclates can be produced from post-consumer household flexible plastics and underscores the importance of systemic enablers including robust Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes, mandated recycled content targets and concessionary capital, as well as a market-driven approach focused on premium recyclates and strong end-market demand.
‘The Quest for Quality’ builds on key learnings from the ValueFlex project launched in 2022 by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, CEFLEX, Roland Berger and HTP Engineering to develop a commercially viable 50,000-tonne-per-year advanced mechanical recycling solution for household flexible plastic packaging waste. However, the facility was ultimately not built due to changing macroeconomic and policy conditions.
The report also aims to provide industry stakeholders with open-source resources to support the development of advanced mechanical recycling capabilities for producing premium recyclates from flexible plastic waste streams. The Alliance notes that the report comes as brands, retailers and packaging producers prepare for the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), which mandates 35% post-consumer recycled content in non-food packaging by 2030.
Key findings from the report include post-consumer household flexibles can be processed into recyclates suitable for 30%+ use in demanding film applications such as shrink films, labels and pouches, using existing advanced sensor-based sorting, hot-washing, and double-melt filtration systems; chemical recycling will be complementary to advanced mechanical recycling, with both producing high-quality recyclates but focusing on different fractions of the flexibles waste stream and target different applications; and achieving high-quality recyclates necessitates a shift in operational philosophy – recyclers ‘must deprioritize’ traditional low-cost, mixed commodity processing and adopt a ‘market-pull’ approach focused on producing premium recyclates that meet converter and brand requirements for demanding film applications.
The Alliance also states that companies in the recycling value chain must leverage enablers such as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies to bridge the economic gap between high-quality recycling and virgin polymers and fund collection and sorting, mandate recycled content targets to drive demand and access concessionary capital to reduce costs. It adds that operators should leverage brownfield site upgrades and shift the heavy sorting burden upstream to centralised Plastics Recovery Facilities (PRFs) to create a viable business case.
In February, the Alliance published a report naming separate waste collection, post-consumer recyclate targets and extended producer responsibility among the essential factors to improve recyclability for flexible plastics. The report lays out a roadmap to enable the adoption of flexible plastic including the creation of homogenous, high-quality recycling feedstock.
A few months later, EFSA published Novel Technology Numbers (NTNs) for 24 developing technologies including Nextek’s mechanical recycling and water-free cleaning processes, NEXTLOOPP and COtooCLEAN. As part of our Comment section, Nextek managing director Professor Edward Kosior detailed the potential for the processes to convert hard-to-recycle polyolefins into food-contact materials and highlights the infrastructural developments required to upscale them.
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