Plastics

| At the IERC 2020, Mr Surendra Borad Patawari, Gemini Corporation N.V., Belgium will provide an overview of developments worldwide on the plastics recycling market. ICM talked to him in advance.

| Plastic film manufacturer RKW relies on Vecoplan’s shredding technology to recycle its production waste.

| Monitoring Recyclates for Europe, a unified online tool to monitor the uptake of recycled polymers into products, is now available for use by converters in the United Kingdom.

| Neste and Ravago start collaboration to enable chemical recycling of over 200,000 tons of plastic waste annually. The oil refiner has set a target to process annually more than one million tons of plastic waste from 2030 onwards.

| The Erema Group's assessment of K 2019 is positive all round. All seven companies and business units were at the show in Düsseldorf and the group of companies presented its entire range of products and services.

| That’s the general consensus among some of Europe’s leading plastic industry commentators – the very people working to re-shape the industry.

| At Ecomondo Tomra launches Gain, a deep learning-based sorting technology, for advanced accuracy of complex sorting tasks at high throughput rates

| The Alliance for beverage cartons and the environment (ACE) has announced that the recycling rate for beverage cartons in the EU28 rose to 49% in 2018.

| RecyClass carried out tests on the compatibility of the ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH) barrier in polyethlene (PE) film with the recycling process.

| Ineos Styrolution has announced an agreement with Sirap to develop packaging solutions based on chemically recycled polystyrene.

| During a meeting held in Düsseldorf at the K trade show, the three Presidents of the European plastics industry associations, Renato Zelcher (European Plastics Converters), Javier Constante (PlasticsEurope) and Ton Emans (Plastic Recyclers Europe), agreed to oppose the Italian Government’s tax proposal of 1000 € per ton of plastic packaging.

| Borealis announces that it will become a Core Partner of the New Plastics Economy, an important global initiative led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The New Plastics Economy unites a broad range of key stakeholders to bring about a circular economy for plastics, in which plastic never becomes waste or pollution.

| The plastics or polymers industry was for many years a hidden industry. For most of its history, nobody has known much about the plastics business because it is sandwiched between oil and gas and a huge variety of finished goods. The meat cannot be seen because of the high visibility of the bread around the sandwich. A guest contribution by John Richardson, Senior Consultant Asia, ICIS.

| Neste and Remondis have signed an agreement to collaborate in the development of chemical recycling of plastic waste.