Starlinger - recycling technology for post-consumer plastics

Although the buzzwords reduce – reuse – recycle date back many years, the idea to turn a linear into a circular economy has gotten a lot of traction lately and is here to stay. The principal idea is to close loops wherever possible. This is a relevant topic for all sorts of materials, but since plastic packaging dominates our everyday life, especially the plastics industry is on the forefront of creating sustainable solutions. To achieve a 100 % closed circle, a number of obstacles have to be overcome. Availability and quality of materials are a big challenge, as for the continuous production with secondary raw materials their supply in sufficient quantities needs to be ensured. This starts with an area-wide collection system – because if nothing is collected, nothing can be recycled. Policy makers provide incentives for waste collection with mandatory quotas but often fail to support the re-use of recycled material. Quotas for collection should be followed by quotas or incentives for recycled content in every new product so that the strictly social or ecological aspect is combined with an economically viable business case. Another big challenge is the recyclability of the product. An important step for this is “design for recycling”: This means that a product is designed in such a way that it can easily be recycled and processed into regranulate of high quality. This requires a lot of industry-wide cooperation since the Circular economy: reduce – reuse – recycle product designer does not necessarily understand the recycling technologies required and hence the recyclability of the product. Industry associations play a vital role in bringing all players in the value chain to the same table to create design-for-recycling guidelines for various products. Yet another obstacle is the attitude of the population towards recycled goods. In the past recycled materials have often been dismissed as inferior compared to products made from virgin material. Lighthouse projects such as PET bottle-to-bottle recycling have helped to change that image and turned plastics recycling from an option into a matter of course.

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTM5Mzg=