Welcome to the Plastics Weekly, NEO’s regular news monitoring of the plastics industry.
This week’s highlights:
- Mastercard has launched a global project to recycle credit and debit cards as part of a plan to save billions of cards in circulation from landfill. The payments company will initially partner with British lender HSBC in the UK to provide shredding machines that can hold 50 kg (110 pounds) of plastic. Once full, the contents will be transferred to a plastic recycling facility. Mastercard estimates that around 600 million cards are produced by the industry each year, with each card having a life span of around five years. (Reuters)
- Germany-based chemical company BASF has opened a Biodegradation and Microplastics Centre of Excellence at its site inMichigan to help customers across North America achieve their circularity and sustainability goals. The centre’s targets include providing holistic, tailored solutions directly for customers supported through scientific studies and consulting, increasing speed-to-market for circular economy products, and advocating on sustainability topics. The centre also includes a biodegradation laboratory that will support biodegradable product development primarily for the food service and packaging, agriculture, detergents, cleaning and cosmetics industries. (Chemical Engineering)
- Neste, a Finland-based company that refines oil waste, residues and raw materials into renewable fuels and sustainable feedstock for plastics and other materials, has invested in an upgraded plastic waste-to-feedstock process at its Finnish refinery. The $111 million investment is set to increase the company’s flexibility in processing lower-quality plastic waste in support of its effort to recycle 150,000 tonnes of liquefied plastic waste into petrochemical feedstock every year. (Packaging Europe)