In response to FCC Environment's (Northampton; www.fccenvironment.co.uk), one of the leading UK waste and resource management companies, recent challenge concerning the market viability of plastics recycling, Ton Emans, president of Plastics Recyclers Europe (PRE, Brussels / Belgium; www.plasticsrecyclers.eu), said:

The recent statement form the Energy from Waste (EfW) industry is wrongly challenging the European waste hierarchy to promote incineration. The waste hierarchy is not anyone’s view but the base of the European waste legislation. The principles are clear: we should avoid generating waste and reuse our product as much as possible. Finally, when the products become waste they should be recycled. So, EfW and landfilling are the less preferred options.

Since this year, waste must be collected separately. Comingling waste together is no longer an option. How can we justify to our citizens who are paying waste taxes and sorting their plastics that these are directly sent to landfills or incineration?

The argument arose during the recent "Identiplast" conference in Rome / Italy, when FCC Environment's sales and marketing director Kristian Dales asked whether there is a commercially viable market for recycled plastics. "Where is the certainty given the downturn in the global commodities market and the recent spiralling of oil prices, the impacts of which are already impacting on demand for recovered plastic polymers?" He added that aside from insufficient campaigns to influence consumer behaviour to avoid contamination, the UK also does not have the reprocessing capacity to deal with added volumes of recovered waste. On top of that, national recycling rates appear to have plateaued, Dales said, asking, "Given the current state of play, are we entering an era of diminished returns with regards to recycling?" Dales added that the thermal treatment of plastics through energy from waste can act as a complementary technology choice, pointing out that the UK exports large amount of refuse derived fuels (RDF), thereby depriving the domestic market of an energy source and also preventing businesses from achieving a closed loop solution to their logistics and production processes. Summing up, he said, "EfW remains a proven and bankable technology."

PRE waits for the new Circular Economy Package to overcome the various market failures in the plastics material value chain. This new legislative proposal will also be a strong tool to reaffirm the basic rules on waste management in Europe to assure a proper implementation in every member state.