Welcome to the Plastics Weekly, NEO’s regular news monitoring of the plastics industry.
This week’s highlights:
- Lego has abandoned a project to make bricks from recycled plastic bottles instead of oil-based plastic, saying it would have led to higher carbon emissions over the product’s lifetime. The move followed efforts by the world’s largest toymaker to research more sustainable materials as companies seek to limit their impact on the environment. The Danish company makes billions of Lego pieces a year, and in 2021 began researching a potential transition to recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), which needs about 2kg of petroleum to make 1kg of plastic. (The Guardian)
- BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, has announced the launch of the industry’s first biomass balance offerings for plastic additives. According to the company, the new range of plastic additives contributes to the replacement of fossil feedstock with renewable raw materials according to a certified biomass balance approach. Thanks to the use of sustainably sourced renewable feedstocks, the product’s cradle-to-gate carbon footprint is significantly reduced by up to 60 percent, compared to the global average product carbon footprint of conventional grades, BASF said. (BASF)
- The plastics industry has launched a $1 million ad campaign designed to reclaim the narrative on plastics recycling. The “Recycling is Real” campaign, carried out by the Plastics Industry Association, is meant to overcome “anti-recycling” rhetoric by educating lawmakers and brands on the benefits of recycling. The messaging is meant to counteract messages from some environmental groups, including Beyond Plastics and Greenpeace, that have criticized plastics recycling as ineffective and misleading and have called to limit further plastic production. (Waste Dive)