The demand for recycled plastic (r-PET) is registering a growing trend driven, among others, by new regulatory requirements or sustainability commitments established by companies, which sometimes become even more ambitious. Specifically, the European Union has established the obligation for bottles to contain 25% r-PET by 2025, a requirement that cannot be met by the national market according to the report ‘r-PET: the best solution to guarantee the circularity of packaging ‘, prepared by the Center for Innovation and Development for the Circular Economy (CIDEC). The report reveals that there is a mismatch between supply and demand in the food r-PET market in Spain: to comply with the European directive, only in the case of bottles, the sector would need 54 kt of this material, while the installed production capacity does not exceed 35 kt.

In the Spanish case, the Government is already working on a new Law on Waste and Contaminated Soils that it will approve in the coming months. The preliminary draft of this includes that 30% of the containers must contain recycled plastic by 2030 -25% by 2025-. A requirement that, if the trend continues, it would not be possible to comply with the r-PET currently available in Spain.

For this reason, the promotion of a competitive secondary market for national recycled plastic is necessary. “This study highlights the many advantages of promoting a secondary market for r-PET in Spain, both due to its lower environmental impacts and the opportunity to create jobs linked to recycling processes and the investments necessary to renew the industrial capacity of our country, in a post-pandemic context that makes it more essential than ever, ”commented Luis Morales, Cidec’s communication manager during the presentation of the report.

Given the importance of the circularity of packaging, the Ministry for Ecological Transition has just opened for public consultation the first Circular Economy Action Plan, which contains 112 measures that are articulated around 8 lines of action – waste management among them- to implement actions in the circular economy in Spain. On the other hand, within the framework of the European Funds, MITERD has also launched a call aimed at obtaining investments for projects that encourage cleaner and more circular business models in key materials such as plastics.

“Once its problems are understood, plastic is a useful and valuable material, also once used, because it can have many lifetimes. The great challenge is that we all understand that no plastic should be intended for a single use ”, explained Juan Manuel Valverde, Cidec’s head of development.

Keys to creating a market for r-PET in Spain

According to the report, if there were a market in Spain capable of producing 100% r-PET bottles, in addition to neutralizing the abandonment of waste in nature, 2.4 grams of CO2 would be saved for each gram of container. This is due to the fact that at present this deficiency of national r-PET is being supplied with the use of virgin PET.

So that this mismatch between supply and demand for r-PET can be translated into opportunities, the report proposes concrete measures to improve the efficiency of the collection and recycling processes in the Spanish market. Among these measures, aimed at public administrations, packaging companies and the management of PET packaging waste, the modification of the tax on non-reusable virgin plastic packaging stands out to provide an exemption in relation to the percentage of recycled plastic that incorporates the products or improvement in the material collection processes that guarantee higher quality, improvement of the technical specifications of the recovered materials and of the r-PET supply procedures.