Medio Ambiente Agricultura y Plásticos (Mapla, Seville / Spain), an association created to organise and finance a new system to manage non-packaging, agricultural plastics waste in Spain, was recently launched in promotion with APE Europe (Levallois-Perret / France; www.apeeurope.eu), Spanish plastics converters association ANAIP (Madrid; www.anaip.es) and plastics recycling organisation Cicloplast (Madrid; www.cicloplast.com). The new assocation represents around 90% of converters and distributors of agricultural plastic films in the country.

In future, other agricultural plastic products such as ropes, meshes and irrigation tapes, are expected to be included. Mapla will organise the management of used films across Spain and finance the collection of this waste through an eco-contribution from the first commercialisation of the products. This is similar to other models already in place in the country, such as for containers, tyres and electronics. The first Mapla-organised collections are planned to start in 2021, with the aim to increase the recycling rate of agricultural plastics.

APE launched a similar UK agricultural plastics collection scheme named APE UK in 2019 – see Plasteurope.com of 02.10.2019. Germany has an agricultural films recycling initiative called Erntekunststoffe Recycling Deutschland (Erde, Bad Homburg / Germany; www.erde-recycling.de) – see Plasteurope.com of 09.07.2019.