How Can Circular Economy Strengthen the Recycling of Plastic Packaging Wastes? Exploratory and Qualitative Case Study of the Danish Plastic Industry

Abstract

This paper investigates how companies in the plastic value chain can comply with the requirements put forward in the European Union’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme for plastic packaging wastes, which must be fully adopted in a Danish context ultimo 2024. Plastic packaging waste for recycling is expected to increase when the EPR scheme enters into force, just as national regulation seeks to avoid the incineration of plastics. Multiple case studies, applying an exploratory and qualitative approach, were conducted with three best-case companies within the plastic value chain to illuminate technical capabilities in sorting and further processing of plastics, current recycles strategies and market positioning. To access the possibility to prevent, reuse, recycle, and recover plastic wastes we make use of the waste hierarchy in combination with a circular economy approach, where suggestions to activities along the cascading chain are proposed to qualify the analysis. This paper reveals that only few recycling plastic value chains have been established that originate from plastic packaging waste from household, and there are none for food packaging reusage; the current unfavorable management practices mostly lead to downcycling of the plastic value chain to recovery only. It is further concluded that strengthening the EPR scheme is important, by applying, for example, eco-design, hereunder to utilize mono plastics of polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and by fee-modulation using taxes/penalties to spur on the plastic industry to produce environmentally friendly products. Finally, alternative sources of handling and producing plastics are outlined as watermark technology, bio-plastics and PtX-nafta.