Making the most of our planet's limited resources is now one of the key challenges our society has to rise up to. In light of this evolution, plastics can bring sustainable solutions provided that their use is supported by appropriate policies, infrastructure and consumer behaviours. Plastics can indeed:
- Do more with less: plastics account for 50% of product packaging while representing only 17% of its overall weight. Therefore, thanks to the growing use of plastics in the packaging sector, less material is required to do more. Plastics also help products reach consumers undamaged, properly sealed, maintained at an appropriate temperature and in the case of food products, kept fresher for longer.
- Improve resource efficiency: using raw materials such as oil and natural gas to make plastics is much more resource-efficient than burning them to create energy, as their life cycle is substantially extended. Moreover, the resources used to produce plastics are progressively decreasing. In Germany, for instance, to produce the same amount of plastics the industry reduced its consumption of oil (from 1.4 to 0.5 million tonnes), coal (from 0.9 to 0.3 million tonnes) and gas (from 6 to 5.8 million tonnes) between 2000 and 2005. Equally the weights of plastic products are reducing, e.g. for plastic carrier bags, the amount of plastics used has been reduced by 70% since the 1980s.
- Be banned from landfills: with today’s focus on resource efficiency there is strong evidence to argue that plastics are a resource that is too valuable to be thrown away. Landfill is not an appropriate solution for plastics waste. In fact, landfilling plastics waste simply means throwing oil away!
At the moment there is no uniform plastics waste management practice in the EU-27 countries; some countries are far ahead, while others are way behind political targets. To address this imbalance PlasticsEurope has developed an ambitious Knowledge Transfer Programme. Within this framework, our role is to communicate a vision of waste management that is in line with the EU waste hierarchy policy, to spread the industry's know-how and share information on our best practices regarding materials sorting and recycling.
Finally, we aim to make the general public aware that a proper plastics waste management scheme leads to greater resource efficiency. PlasticsEurope advocates for plastics to be recycled where it is both economically and environmentally viable to do so. But for those products where this is not an option, their energy should be recovered through the use of advanced thermal processes such as combined heat and power, or converted into new plastics and fuels.