Michael Brunn

FEAD strongly supports the Council's continued recognition that pre-consumer and biobased plastics must not count towards the recycled content targets. Including such materials would divert attention from real recycling efforts and create a false sense of progress. Post-consumer plastic waste must remain the baseline to support meaningful investment in ELV recycling and ensure measurable circularity.

Making clothing from water-intensive cotton has a major impact on the climate. That's why cellulose from other raw materials has come into focus in recent years as a more resource-smart method of textile production. Up to now, the efforts have concentrated on wood-based cellulose. But in a recently published study, researchers investigated a different path for cellulose fibre manufacture, by using waste products from agriculture, which Sweden has a lot of.

Almost €47 billion (61.4% of total environmental protection investments) was spent by corporations on purchasing technologies and equipment to reduce environmental pressures from their production processes (for example, equipment to reduce air emissions). The general government and the non-profit sector accounted for the remaining 38.6% of investments.

The furnace, which can hold up to 25 tonnes, is used in particular for the recycling of so-called "low grades", i.e. heavily contaminated scrap and dross produced during the melting process. The name of the new tiltable rotary furnace was chosen from suggestions made by the staff of Speira business unit Recycling Services. This honours a colleague who died at an early age and who was already involved 1999 in the construction and commissioning of the furnace that has now been replaced.

Today, Europe's Environment Ministers bowed to pressure from the automotive industry by voting to weaken a crucial regulation to make the sector more circular, warn environmental NGOs.

Large plastics recycling plants need more than simply upscaling the individual components. The larger the size of the extruder screw, the greater the technological challenges. The start-up last summer of the largest Intarema system to date, with a throughput of over four tonnes per hour, confirms that EREMA offers reliable solutions for high throughputs. The next smaller size 2021 has now been further developed. At the K show, Erema will launch the Intarema 2021 TVEplus with a diameter of 2 metres for the preconditioning unit (PCU) and 212 millimetres for the extruder screw, which for the first time features a single end-to-end extrusion unit. With a throughput of up to 3.5 tonnes per hour and a footprint of just 15.1 x 3 metres, this recycling system is over two metres shorter than the previous cascade design, in which two extruders were connected by a melt pipe. The new design also reduces the melt temperature, lowers energy consumption and minimises maintenance requirements.

Such a certification is required by Article 6 of Regulation (EU) 2022/1616 on recycled plastic materials and articles intended for food contact.

After about two months, the decomposition results in the finest fresh compost, which is used as a fertiliser by agricultural establishments. Some of the compost is further processed by the soil specialist Terre Suisse, which refines it using additives such as wood fibres, bark humus and sand to create high-quality substrates and potting soil.

Federica joined EuPC in 2019 and has since built an impressive track record within the organisation. Initially working within the Packaging Division, she soon took on a leadership role in the Automotive Division, while also promoting innovation across the European plastics value chain through her involvement in several EU-funded initiatives in close cooperation with the major European R&D centres active in the plastics and composites sectors.

The European Commission has announced a law on the circular economy for the coming year. What the law is supposed to be about is still very vague. FEAD, one of the two European recycling associations, has already drawn up a list of demands.