Industry associations Petcore Europe (Brussels / Belgium; www.petcore-europe.org), PlasticsEurope (Brussels; www.plasticseurope.org), Plastics Recyclers Europe (PRE, Brussels; www.plasticsrecyclers.eu) and VinylPlus (Brussels; www.vinylplus.eu) are forming “PolyREC”, a system to monitor, verify and report their plastics recycling and uptake data across Europe. PolyREC will use a common data collection system called “RecoTrace”, assisted by VinylPlus’ data-collection scheme “Recovinyl”.

The associations said the system will be able to fulfil the objectives of the Circular Plastics Alliance (www.circular-plastics-alliance.com), legislative traceability demands and industry-wide plastic recycling pledges. The European Commission had launched the “Circular Plastics Alliance” in December 2018 to improve the economics and quality of plastics recycling in Europe (see Plasteurope.com of 17.12.2018).

“Setting up mechanisms that evidence progress in driving plastic circularity in a transparent manner is a must if we are to meet the EU targets,” said PRE president Ton Emans. “This mutual approach to data collection is indispensable to measure the industry’s advancement while using the same yardstick.” The associations are calling for interested organisations to join the scheme.