SOLVING THE PLASTIC WASTE PROBLEM BY 2025 THROUGHOUT EUROPE

The official European position on the processing of plastic waste is that the task is not just huge but also very difficult to solve.

According to the ‘Junker Commission’ the EU wide-strategy is “to have all plastic packaging reusable for recycled in a cost-effective manner by 2030”. That statement supposes that it's possible to move from the current state of processing averaged at less than 15% of the 25.8 million tonnes of plastic waste in Europe alone up to 100%, in just 12 years. OK well then where is the plan?

In France the Prime Minister Edouard Phillipe has declared his Governments determination to achieve 100% recycling of all plastic waste by 2025. That means that the nearly 5.5million tonnes consumed each year in France shall be treated and recycled in less than 7 years from the current level of less than 15%.OK well again where is the plan?

Its clear that neither of these statements are followed up with a plan describing how to do this- because it's really hard to achieve that – given that the infrastructure to process this type of material correlates to a cost of about 7million€ per 10,000 tonnes. Taking this fact into account, the total investment needed becomes astronomical even if there is a base assumption that all the plastic once treated, has a value at all- in reality, a great deal of this tonnage has no market value at all even after it is recycled, so it constitutes a cost and not a profit to treat it.

My project specifies not just a contribution to this problem, but an approach which could very well spell out the solution to this pervasive problem. The basic premise is to engage and employ, all of the citizens of Europe to contribute to this problem. As a base, its already happening as currently in most countries, there is a system employed to collect packaging from each household which is taken to a central or regional sorting facility. This process is both expensive and inefficient, it means that following a tour of a town or suburb, the collection truck is filled with a mixture of materials, all contaminated with plenty of air being transported along with the bottles, cartons and the like.

Now, if each home was equipped with a miniature processing appliance where this material was ground, sorted and cleaned, then collection would transport valuable material directly to a place of processing rather than to a place where it has to be sorted and on to processing. The difference would constitute a matter of Billions of euros in investments and a lot of time and energy saved.

This idea supposes that each household throughout the EU would be firstly, equipped with an appliance to do this processing and secondly, that the occupants would agree to use it to ‘dispose’ of their plastic packaging. These Objectives could be where the EU comes into its own with a regulatory and incentivization programme, both ‘carrot and stick' to help to achieve this outcome. Specifically an EU directive could become law that ALL new built homes should include such an appliance and that any existing dwellings could receive a subsidy to retrofit such a device. In France alone, that would translate into 18 million miniature processing plants by 2025 and that these will account for the pre-processing of 56% of recyclable  and valuable plastic waste. In the absence of another viable plan from Governments at National or EU level, then thjis idea must surely have a chance of success- this is an initative which should be taken very seriously at all levels.

I’m looking for comments and participation to build such a programme in the regulatory sense and to support the innovation to create all of the elements of this programme.