What does a future-proof, sustainable plastics industry geared to recycling look like? Adopting four strategic approaches, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology (Umsicht, Oberhausen, Germany, www.umsicht.fraunhofer.de) and the Dutch TNO institute set out their ideas as to what this assessment could look like in a recently published white paper, From #plasticfree to future-proof plastics. 

We spoke with the author of the study, Jürgen Bertling.

PIE: What prompted you to compile your white paper, From #plasticfree to future-proof plastics?

Jürgen Bertling: Intense discussions are currently underway on the best strategies for recycling plastics. This is borne out by the debates and numerous position papers being published by the associations in respect of the planned European Plastics and Plastics Waste Regulation (PPWR; editor’s note). We, however, feel that there is a lack of neutral and well-founded expertise for assessing and prioritising the strategies and options that exist for action. 

What are your most important findings?

Bertling: The different recycling strategies – chemical or mechanical recycling and single or multiple use – need to be prioritised. This is what we are doing, and we are justifying it with the argument of “keeping options open”. The European and German circular economy legislation essentially makes provision for prioritisation too, albeit in simple form with a waste hierarchy that has so far served more to name the different waste types. We feel that any deviation from this prioritisation, i.e. the direct adoption of single-use solutions with recycling for packaging, needs to be legitimised by socio-ecological assessments going much further than today’s “toing and froing about life cycle assessment”. 

Related: Fraunhofer study says plastic crates more sustainable than throwaway cardboard

In the study, you write: “From a scientific and societal point of view, we can neither continue to use plastics in the same way as we have done in the past nor dispense with them altogether” – how should we then deal with plastics in the future? 

Bertling: We essentially think that a ban on individual applications only represents a suitable approach in exceptional cases. Instead, we believe it is important to push ahead with and promote multiple-use, long service lives and repairability. A tax on resources or greenhouse gas emissions and reduced VAT rates on repairs could help drive this forward. In the case of recycling, it would be better to focus on reuse quotas rather than recycling ones.

You call for “polymers to be redesigned as oxygen-richer polymers based on biomass and the use of CO2” – what does that mean?

Bertling: On the one hand, oxygen components in polymers reduce carbon content and hence CO₂ emissions and, on the other, they facilitate microbial attack and hence, in the case of plastic emissions – which can never be fully ruled out – they at least serve to improve degradation. That applies in the case of polyester, for example. 

Together with TNO, Fraunhofer Umsicht has now also launched the European Circular Plastics Platform. What is the aim of this platform?

Bertling: It aims to support small and medium-sized companies in particular as they make the move into a circular economy. We assume that an efficient circular economy calls for cooperation between companies over the length of the value chain to a much greater extent than a linear flow economy. We are available as partners to facilitate and shape this cross-company cooperation.

Jürgen Bertling is deputy head of the Sustainability and Participation department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology (Umsicht), which prepares sustainability assessments for products, processes, and services among other things.