Welcome to the Plastics Weekly, NEO’s regular news monitoring of the plastics industry.
This week’s highlights:
- Hong Kong faces an urgent challenge to rescue its struggling recycling industry. Some 75,190 tonnes of plastic bottles were estimated to have ended up in the country’s landfills in 2022. Only around 12.3% of Hong Kong’s nearly one million tonnes of various plastic waste was sent for recycling that year, according to Environmental Protection Department statistics. That puts the country’s plastic recycling rate well below that of the United States and Europe, whose current PET recycling rates are at 31% and 52%, according to industry associations. (South China Morning Post)
- Plastics Recyclers Europe (PRE) has warned that recycled plastic imports threaten the European plastics recycling market. According to PRE, in 2023 prices for recyclates decreased by up to 50% through October alongside a significant increase of cheap imports from outside the EU. The Brussels-based group says this is creating an unbalanced market with serious environmental consequences, as well as contributing to the EU’s de-industrialization. (Recycling Today)
- Tetra Pak, a multinational food packaging and processing company with HQ in Switzerland, has announced investment in recycling in Europe in a bid to boost the recovery of its beverage cartons. A key target are the non-fibre protective layers of polyethylene and aluminium (polyAl). The move aims to support the goals of the proposed EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) by ensuring that all packaging components are recycled and valuable raw materials are kept in circulation for longer. In 2023, Tetra Pak invested nearly EUR 40 million to accelerate beverage carton recycling worldwide and plans to increase this amount over the coming years. (Recycling International)