In the context of January 16 announcement on the plastics strategy initiative by the European Commission, PlasticsEurope is thrilled to announce the publication of its "Plastics 2030 - Voluntary Commitment”, which contains a set of ambitious targets and initiatives representing the plastics industry contribution to achieve a fully circular and resource efficient Europe. This voluntary commitment focuses on increasing re-use and recycling, preventing plastics leakage into the environment, and accelerating resource efficiency. 

"Building a long-term sustainable development requires courage, innovation and concrete actions”, said Daniele Ferrari, president of PlasticsEurope and CEO of Versalis (Eni). "It is in this spirit that we designed the “Plastics 2030 - Voluntary Commitment”. With these ambitious pledges, the European plastics industry is effectively contributing to shape new sustainable solutions to address global challenges”.

The European plastics manufacturers are committed to ensure high rates of re-use and recycling with the ambition to reach 60% for plastics packaging by 2030. This will lead to achieve our goal of 100% re-use, recycling and/or recovery of all plastics packaging in the EU-28, Norway and Switzerland by 2040. To this end, PlasticsEurope will strengthen its efforts and collaboration along the value chain and with public authorities to deliver increasingly sustainable plastics solutions. PlasticsEurope has already established three European platforms (i.e. ECVM1, PCEP2 and Styrenics Circular Solutions) to accelerate innovation towards more efficient chemical and mechanical recycling.

Another important pillar of Plastics 2030 are the activities for the prevention of plastic leakage into the environment. PlasticsEurope will continue setting up educational projects across member states to increase awareness on sustainable consumer behaviour. It will strengthen the industry programme to prevent pellet loss (Operation Clean Sweep) by increasingly involve the entire value chain, including transport and logistics. Lastly, PlasticsEurope will launch new research activities to complete knowledge gaps on the most common plastic items being littered in the marine environment, with a view to identify suitable solutions.

PlasticsEurope will complement these efforts with other actions aimed at enhancing plastics’ resource efficiency and accelerate innovation for circularity. This will involve: further research into alternative feedstocks; more frequent updates of product life-cycle inventories and environmental product declarations; the publication of extended waste data; new eco-design guidelines for plastics packaging; standardization of industrial best practices and methodologies.

By mid-2018, PlasticsEurope will set up concrete action plans and time-based performance indicators, which will be used to evaluate the achievement of these objectives. The results will be monitored by an independent committee, made of representatives of academia, the European Commission, the European Parliament, civil society and PlasticsEurope. Also, from 2019, an annual progress report will be published.