Environmental service provider Interseroh’s (Cologne / Germany; www.interseroh.com) centre for plastics recycling in Slovenia’s second largest city, Maribor, has received international accreditation according to standard ISO/IEC 17025:2017 for laboratories. The ISO standard is for general requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories, and the company says this makes it the only recognised research institution in the EU to be specialised in the development and analysis of recycled plastics. The plastics research centre in Maribor has also fulfilled the requirements of the Slovenian accreditation body Slovenske akreditacije.

The German company is a subsidiary of recycling group Alba (Berlin / Germany; www.alba.info) and has been operating the plastics recycling competence centre in Maribor since 2016. Among other things, it has been developing recyclate there (see Plasteurope.com of 29.09.2017).

According to PlasticsEurope (Brussels / Belgium; www.plasticseurope.org), Slovenia’s recycling rate of post-consumer plastics waste is just over 30%, with around 30% landfilled and the rest used in energy recovery. The country had a plastic packaging recycling rate that was just over the EU-28 plus Norway and Switzerland average of 42% in 2018. Slovenian plastics converters annually process less than half a million tonnes of thermoplastics, polyurethanes and other plastics (excluding fibres made of PET, polyamide and polypropylene as well as adhesive and coatings).