Executive Summary

Executing start

Urban environments are major players in the transition toward the circular economy. Currently, about 85% of global Gross Domestic Product is generated through cities. Plastics are one of the most used products in our society with a high impact on our environment, such as on the climate and on the natural environment (ocean soup and microplastics).
In the EU on average only 30% of plastic waste is being recycled. By recycling more plastics emissions can be avoided. That is why the EU wants to increase recycling rates to 55% by 2025.

In plastic recycling there is not enough focus on post-consumer non-household (PC NH) plastic waste (from businesses). Because the composition of these plastics is well known and contaminations are nearly non-existent, recycling should be easy.
In the PlastiCity project we aimed to increase the recycling rates of PC NH plastic waste in four urbanised pilot areas by establishing an urban platform and working together on innovative logistical solutions for the collection, determining the flows and the qualities with a mobile unit. By realising the business case of recycled plastic products new (local) value chains would be established.

In this project we’ve learned learned that by working together with partners in the plastic chain, effective logistics e.g. collective milk-run and/or reverse logistics in combination with cross docking can be realised to bundle the plastic in a central location. From there the plastics can be fed into the current recycling chain, be recycled on the spot and used to design and produce new products from recycled plastics. We also learned that the project impacted other policy fields, like climate change, air quality and congestion.

These and other learnings have been used to develop this handbook. This handbook contains guidelines for local or regional governmental organisations for setting up a circular network with local players in the plastic value chain to develop new value chains for non-household post-consumer (NH-PC) plastic waste in urban environments.

The handbook has been developed by the consortium partners of the Interreg 2 Seas project “PlastiCity”. This project has received funding from the Interreg 2 Seas programme 2014-2020 co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund under subsidy contract No 2S05021.

plasticityproject.eu