Plastics

| New data on plastics waste management shows an important growth in plastics waste collection.

| Although volumes, prices and confidence are all down, BIR Plastics Committee Chairman Surendra Patawari Borad of Belgium-based Gemini Corporation NV still spied “some silver linings in the grey clouds” for plastics recyclers.

| On 24 November 2015, the annual Petcore Europe Conference will take place in Brussels. The conference brings together more than 100 experts and leaders from the whole PET value chain in Europe and beyond as well as representatives from the European institutions. This year, the conference will focus on the four key aspects Sustainability, Circular Economy, Innovation and Globalisation.

| Within the Hiperdry project, a new prototype dryer for plastics pellets has been developed, combining microwave heating with superheated steam convective drying. An optimum antenna design will allow for gentle microwave application allows gentle microwave application to avoid overheating or damaging the polymer. The system is designed for time and energy efficient drying of conventional and bio-plastics.

| According to RECOUP, over 492,623 tonnes of plastics packaging was collected from UK households in 2014/15, an increase of around 30,000 tonnes or 6% on the previous year.

| APK has developed a technology capable of producing particularly high quality recycled regranulates from post-consumer film scrap originating from Germany's Dual System collection scheme (DSD). This scrap, known as fraction 310, consists of pieces of PE and PP film with a greater or lesser degree of contamination which is supplied to APK in bale form. The products leaving the elaborate cleaning, separation and recycling process are Mersalen LDPE Recompounds and also the particularly readily processable MDPE ReCompounds in pellet form.

| The Polymark Consortium has published its preliminary technical results outlining the successful development of food-contact approved chemical markers, a marking technique of the targeted packaging and a detection technology suitable for high speed sorting.

| According to Petcore, the equivalent of 66 billion 1.5L PET bottles were collected and recycled in 2014, representing 57% of bottles and containers placed in the market.

| Customers of Spanish plastics recycler Reciplast were able to cut down their production costs with the high-quality recycled LDPE resin the company provides.

| The World Plastics Council (WPC) welcomes that the leaders of the G-7, at their recent summit in Germany, have defined a bold action plan to reduce marine litter.

| Current market developments on the PET packaging market are putting the future of PET recycling at risk.

| During the EuPC General Assembly in Warsaw, EuPC launched a Strategic Alliance for Polymer Supplies in Europe. This Alliance was formed in response to a recent series of force majeure declarations by some of the leading EU polymer suppliers leading to shortage of material on the European market and is the consequence of very unhappy plastics converters that do not wish to see this repeated in the future.

| North American plastic recyling company Cedar Poly LLC recently commissioned a plastic washing system from Lindner washTech which enabled them to significantly boost both capacity and product quality.

| Quality recycling and sorting have been the focal point of the Plastic Recyclers Europe (PRE) Annual Meeting 2014 which took place on the 20th and 21st of November in Brussels.