On the one hand, the current collection infrastructures have reached their limit and the collection of PET bottles is stagnating around 50% whereas the balance of the uncollected PET is still landfilled or incinerated.
Casper van den Dungen, according to chairman of the EuPR PET Working Group, said: “Europe is not maximising the sustainable use of a valuable resource such as post-consumer PET.
“Furthermore, due to intensive lightweighting and complex bottle design the average costs of recycling have increased substantially in recent years. Such increased costs cannot currently be corrected by further economies of scale.
“On the other hand, recent years have seen an increase in demand for recycled PET and this has led to a significant increase in investments in many new recycling lines.
“The combined effect of these market failures are causing recycling plants to operate at well below 75% of their capacity.”
Source: EuPR
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