CIRC-PACK: Towards circular economy in the packaging value chain.

This group of partners has joined forces to reinvent and develop more sustainable, re-usable forms of plastic packaging and support market uptake of the developed solutions. The aim is to promote a transition to a circular economy contributing to the achievement of EU waste management and recycling targets by 2030. The overall objective is the demonstration and replication of key enabling strategies and actions in every step of the plastic packaging sector value chain that will facilitate the transition from the current linear value chain to a chain aligned with circular economy principles. The actions foreseen in the project will target seven specific objectives distributed in three Demo Cases (DC) looking for a New and Sustainable Plastics Economy. Its ambition is to deliver better system-wide economic and environmental outcomes by i) decoupling the chain from fossil feedstocks, (ii) reducing the negative environmental impact of plastic packaging; and (iii) creating an effective after-use plastics economy. In addition, in order to enhance the replicability of the proposed innovations, sustainable business models will be applied, thus activating a self-spreading principle that will open the door for the wide implementation of CIRC-PACK principles. 1.CIRC-PACK will seek and validate 100% new biodegradable materials, from renewable resources, non-competitive with human crops, for targeted applications along the plastic value chain, which will be cost competitive regarding current fossil based plastics. 2. CIRC-PACK will design and validate new packaging solutions that will enable and/or facilitate the end-of-life separation of materials. Full-scale testing of the sorting equipment will be developed for a wide range of plastic materials, to evaluate the capacity of the plastic sorting facilities in Europe. Rigid and flexible packaging will be developed under the requirements of these technological solutions. In addition, complete substitution of current multilayer products by fully biodegradable multilayer solutions and fully bio-based multimaterial structures (fully compatible with most of the existing paper and board recycling processes preventing the actual stream of mixed paper/plastic waste), will both be addressed. 3. CIRC-PACK will trigger the utilization of recycled material as raw material and create closed-loop recycling flows and multi-sectorial cascade recycling process. 4.CIRC-PACK will address the barriers to facilitate a broader transition to the circular economy. 5. CIRC-PACK will lay a roadmap of regional and national integration strategies of waste management of plastics based on the previous objectives and case studies. 6. CIRC-PACK will develop a life-cycle methodology to assess the performance of CIRC-PACK value chain in terms of circularity improvement. 7. CIRC-PACK will demonstrate the environmental, social and economic impact of the new circular value chain contributing to the uptake of project results and assessing the sustainability of the proposed technical and non-technical solutions, in view to the European targets (increase the collecting rate at least up to 48%, the recycling rate by 37% in 2020, and reducing the landfilling rate up to 15% by 2020). 8. CIRC-PACK will develop new sustainable business models to enable a circular use of plastic materials will be applied, thus activating a self-spreading principle that will open the door for wide implementation of CIRC-PACK principles. General impacts: - Substantially improving the efficient use of resources in Europe, leading to significant reduction of adverse environmental impacts, including on climate change and to optimization of production. - Substantially reducing the generation of residual waste, by applying the principles of the waste hierarchy, compared to current practices. - Creating new business opportunities for industry and SMEs in the EU, and improving the competitiveness of European enterprises in the global market for eco-innovative solutions. - Demonstrating the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the proposed approaches and main elements that a business plan should include in order to realize them. - Providing evidence-based knowledge for enabling framework conditions that facilitate a broader transition to the circular economy in the EU. Firstly, the direct impact of CIRC-PACK innovations will be proved in the selected demo cases. Each Demo Case is linked to a different deployment level of the CIRC-PACK project. In the demo case A, the impact is related to the dependence of packaging products from fossil row material. This first demo has been designed with the aim to offer cost effective alternatives based on fully biobased materials to the plastic value chain in the spirit of substituting the current oil-based polyolefin. The biobased plastic material produced in the monomer extraction and polymerization optimised processes will be used for different applications as food trays, films, coffee capsules, bottles, jars, plastic bags, minipallets and AHP films. Those new products will be tested and validated considering all the requirements of these final applications and the social well-being. The impact of the demo A will be relied on the impact of the biopolymer obtained. This biopolymer will also improve the biodegradability of the final products as well as increase the capacity of making those wastes more compostable, in comparison to those materials that currently end into the landfills as persistent wastes. The deployment level of the demo case B is linked to the plastic packaging value chain and how the proper design of the packaging formats will boost the recycling rate, and therefore, reduce the negative impact after end of life. This demo has been designed for giving solution to the most difficult packaging waste to be processed namely multi-material (board and plastic) and multilayer (several polymers). To achieve this aim, materials develop For any inputs about consumer issues in the plastic-packaging industry, feel welcome to contact Ms. Belén Ramos, Project Officer of this project at OCU (Organización de Consumidores y Usuarios, Spain). Email: belenra@ocu.org For more detailed information: www.circpack.eu Twitter: @circ_economy LinkedIn Group: Circular economy, Plastic: from waste to resource