Welcome to the Plastics Weekly, NEO’s regular news monitoring of the plastics industry.
This week’s highlights:
- The European Union has launched a project called STOPP to reduce plastic waste and promote sustainable food packaging. The initiative will run for three years and aims to help cut packaging waste by 2030, in line with the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive. The project is led by the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and includes a total of 14 partners from seven countries, who will establish circular strategies for plastic usage and processing. Partners include the University of Vaasa, the National Institute of Chemistry of Slovenia, Remondis Recycling, GreenDelta, Plastics Recyclers Europe, Veolia, Braskem and reCIRCLE. (Recycling International)
- University of Oxford researchers have developed an ambitious roadmap to drive the plastic circular economy. Published in the journal Nature, the blueprint from authors at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Plastics offers a comprehensive strategy that challenges prevailing technical, economic, and policy paradigms driving the current plastic economy. The study is accompanied by a timeline of technical, economic, policy and legal interventions that provide stakeholders with a roadmap to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. (Innovation News Network)
- French multinational firm TotalEnergies has produced chemically recycled plastics for the first time in the United States at its polypropylene plant in La Porte, Texas. The company signed a feedstock agreement with New Hope Energy’s chemical recycling facility in Texas for 100,000 tonnes of recycled plastics to be sent through the new facility each year. New Hope’s feedstock was then converted into monomers at BASF’s and TotalEnergies’ Petrochemicals (BTP) facility in Port Arthur, Texas. “After Europe, this first production of circular polymers from chemical recycling in the United States is a new step forward in our commitment to meeting the global market’s growing demand for more innovative and sustainable plastics, as well as in our ambition to produce one million tonnes of circular polymers a year by 2030,” said Heather Tomas, vice president polymers Americas at TotalEnergies. (Sustainable Plastics)