Is European recycling up to the plastic waste challenge?

This is the concluding article in a three-part series exploring oil, plastics demand and sustainability.

European governments and corporates are setting ambitious goals on plastics recycling, but there are practical and economic hurdles to get over if the policies are to be a success.

Not only do some countries’ domestic markets lag behind, but there is a general reliance on material from countries such as Germany and the Netherlands where more inroads have been made to cope with high levels of demand.

So what are the key challenges that European countries need to overcome for their recycling aims to be realised?

Lackluster recycling rates

Collection rates are the biggest concern. This is the amount of plastic waste that is placed into the recycling stream by consumers. The collected plastic is processed into post-consumer bales, which become the feedstock for recyclers. It is in this most important factor that disparity is seen between European countries.

Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands enjoy higher collection rates, chiefly because they have effective consumer deposit return schemes that have been running for decades in many cases. A deposit return scheme works because it gives a financial incentive to consumers to recycle their plastic bottle, thus creating more supply of a good quality feedstock.

France and the UK, on the other hand, do not have deposit return schemes and have relatively low collection rates.

It is not just the rate of collection that is important - the quality of what is being collected also matters. Deposit return schemes work well because they provide a supply source that is, theoretically, almost 100% good quality, usable feedstock.

In Scandinavia, one market source even went as far as to say that the recycled polyethylene terephthalate flakes are of such a high quality that they can be fed directly into the machine that creates the bottles, and mixed with virgin PET. Normally the flakes must be processed further into pellets before being turned into a plastic bottle.

UK recycling, however, does not produce such high quality feedstock. There are two main reasons for this, which sources say must be addressed if the industry is to cope with expected growth in demand.

The first is consumer mixed recycling. The disadvantages of mixed recycling mean that when waste is brought to a mechanical recycling plant there are a significant number of contaminants that must be removed from the waste stream to create a usable feedstock. Not all the contaminants can always be successfully removed and, inevitably, not all of the PET will be recovered. Some will escape and move to landfill.

Simply put, by starting off with a lower quality waste stream, a lower quality feedstock is produced. This means that a lower-quality end product may be produced and less of the processed post-consumer material can be successfully recycled.

Output quality also determines the future use of the recycled product. Food-grade recycled PET pellets have to be of a very high quality, meaning only recycled material that was originally food-grade can be used and has to be processed several times. This increases costs and, even for countries with successful deposit return schemes, it is a tightly supplied market. Food-grade R-PET pellets, assessed by S&P Global Platts for the first time on February 6, 2019, can therefore be expected to command a premium price.

Go deeper: explore S&P Global Platts petrochemicals news

To boost the amount of collected waste that can be successfully recycled, sources have suggested that a deposit return scheme, akin to those in the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia, could be introduced in the UK. This would help increase supply, by providing the consumer an incentive to recycle and increase the quality of that supply, by having a dedicated PET supply stream.

In late March 2018, the UK Government proposed the introduction of a deposit return scheme as a means of increasing collection rates within the UK. According to the government’s Commons Select Committee environmental audit, a deposit return scheme in the UK could significantly increase recycling rates to between 80-90%, as in countries with successful deposit return schemes.

Effective, but costly

The German deposit return scheme has certainly helped increase recycling rates. Around 93% of PET bottles are reused and over 97% of bottles are deposited. As a result, the average recycled content of PET bottles in 2017 in Germany was just over 24%. Forum PET, an industry group that campaigns for the sustainable use of PET, now aims to increase this recycled material to 50% by 2022. This is much higher than the UK government’s plans of 30% by 2022.

These schemes, however, come at a cost, both in the installation process and in the incentive that needs to be given to the consumer – large enough to tempt them, but not so large that the recyclers are unable to pay. They also take time: time to gain enough coverage over the country, time for consumers to become used to depositing and time for recyclers to receive consistently good quality supply.

Sweden’s deposit return scheme started in the mid-1980s, while the rest of Scandinavia introduced schemes in the 1990s and early 2000s. In Germany, the scheme started in 2003 and there are now plans for expansion of products that can be deposited, beyond beverage bottles.

Despite the high costs involved in introducing and maintaining deposit return schemes, the increase in collection rates and quality of collection is sizeable. For the UK and France to meet their proposed policies on recycled content, introducing schemes seems to be a must. Even European countries that already have a scheme will have to increase participation in some way to meet increasingly ambitious recycled plastics policies.

Read the other articles in this series:

Part 1: Consumer push for sustainability masks massive growth in plastic demand

Part 2: The Middle East’s petrochemicals push signals oil’s future