Closure industry is gearing up for PPWR

Following our recent Plastic Closure Innovations event in Barcelona, Martyna Fong, Director of Market Intelligence, shares some insights from the event!

Whilst the city was preparing for the American Sailing Cup, the industry was gearing up for the impacts of PPWR!

Brace, brace! as the magnitude of impact could be as follows:

• If collection targets go well, we will recover 9 million tonnes of plastic from consumer packaging by 2030, of which >3.2 million tonnes PET bottles and >300 kilo tonnes of HDPE from bottle caps
• The demand for plastics will contract by 1 million tonnes in consumer packaging by 2030, given reduction of use targets
• We will need >1 million tonnes of rPET for bottles, > 300 kilo tonnes of rPET for trays and ~250 kilo tonnes of rPP/rHDPE for closure solutions by 2030, given recyclate inclusion targets.
• We should have enough of material collected for recovery to meet those targets, but there is an urgent need to develop testing methods for food grade approvals and/or sufficient technology base for chemical recycling.

Other than this, my conference notes include:

• in the context of a successful DRS tethered closure designs seem redundant, given that caps are returned with bottles anyway
• potential disruptive innovation in PET closures
• potential value chain disruption via packaging converters integrating recycling operation and this recyclate production
• refill/reuse schemes are starting to appear, currently in favour of return to store model
• digital technologies are absolutely critical in developing effective DRS and other policy measures in place to track progress

The slide below summarises action points that still need to be established to get us underway.

For further information on this article, please contact Martyna Fong.

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