Europe's plastics recycling capacity has declined significantly over last three years - Eco Baltia Vide

RIGA - Europe has seen a significant decline in plastic recycling capacity over the past three years, Janis Aizbalts, Chairman of the Board of the environmental management company Eco Baltia Vide, told LETA in an interview.

Commenting on a European Union (EU) regulation that strengthens requirements for packaging recyclability, labelling and reuse, Aizbalts said that there are many regulations coming from Europe at the moment on what should be done about recyclability, labelling and many other things. Operators can collect the waste, recyclers can recycle it, but at the moment there are not many mechanisms in Europe to make somebody buy the recycled material.

"To give you an idea of what the result is, in the last three years Europe has lost capacity in plastics recycling equivalent to the entire volume of waste collected in the Baltic countries in a year. Recycling plants have simply gone bankrupt," he said.

The causes can be traced back to the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Aizbalts noted.

At the same time, Aizbalts said that the biggest problem at the moment is not that manufacturers are producing multi-layered packaging that cannot be recycled, as both sorting and recycling technologies have evolved. Rather, the question is whether we will end up in a situation like in southern Italy, where plastic waste is no longer collected because there is nowhere to recycle it. There is no demand for recycled plastic pellets in Europe.

"Let us be honest, the whole of Europe is currently relying on plastic pellets made in China using Russian oil, and we imagine that we are not supporting the Russian war machine. Almost all the plastic packaging we buy in Europe today is made from Chinese pellets and Russian oil," said Aizbalts.

He explained that since Russian oil is banned in many places, pellets made from it are cheap, so nobody is interested in pellets recycled from waste and European factories are going bankrupt.

The good thing about the new regulation, said Aizbalts, is that it makes sorting easier for people. From this year, pictograms are already being introduced on waste containers, and in a few years' time the same pictograms will appear on product packaging.

Asked about the performance of the recycling companies in the Eco Baltia group, Aizbalts noted that if these companies were not part of the group, they would be on the bankrupt list.

Aizbalts said that most of the recycling companies that have survived in Europe have done so because they are part of a larger group and can therefore be supported, cross-subsidized, given more material, regardless of overall market trends. By contrast, the companies that stood on their own have now mostly gone out of business.

He pointed out that there are also a number of companies in Lithuania and Poland that have closed down. There are also some in Latvia, but the scale of their activity was relatively small in the past.

Aizbalts noted that efforts were being made to talk about the problem in the company, including with the European Commissioner for the Environment when she was in Latvia.

He expressed the hope that the issue would gradually start to move at European level and that the European Commission would start to think about it. This does not change the last three years, because the waste recycling industry in Europe is almost dead.