2024-02-14 18:01:42
Plastic companies have pulled the plug on an initiative to become more sustainable together. Under government leadership, companies wanted to achieve ambitious environmental goals, but these turned out to be unattainable without additional legislation. “I hope this is a wake-up call.”
“Voorkom gezichtsverlies van het Plastic Pact NL”, staat in juni 2023 boven een document dat ambtenaren naar staatssecretaris Vivianne Heijnen (Infrastructuur en Waterstaat) sturen. Het pact, dat haar ministerie in 2019 zelf had gelanceerd om duurzamer gebruik van plastic aan te moedigen, staat alweer op omvallen.
De bedoelingen van het pact waren zo mooi: “meer met minder plastic“, luidde de slogan. De ruim honderd aangesloten bedrijven zouden koplopers worden die minder plastic op de markt brengen. Wat overbleef moest beter recyclebaar worden, van meer gerecycled materiaal worden gemaakt én daadwerkelijk een tweede leven krijgen.
Maar het bleek lastig om die mooie beloftes na te komen. In de praktijk belandt meer dan de helft van de verpakkingen nog in de verbrandingsoven. Minder dan een kwart van het plastic dat de bedrijven in het pact gebruiken is gemaakt van gerecycled materiaal. De hoeveelheid plastic die op de markt wordt gebracht nam maar mondjesmaat af.
Lichtpuntje is de introductie van verpakkingen die in theorie recyclebaar zijn. In 2022 ging het om 86 procent van de verpakkingen. Het doel om alle verpakkingen recyclebaar te maken in 2025 is in zicht. Maar het was niet genoeg om het pact te redden.
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Plug out of the pact
The plug was finally pulled from the Plastic Pact on January 1, Heijnen wrote to the House of Representatives this week. There had been internal doubts regarding the collaboration for some time, according to one research that had the Plastic Pact implemented.
“Not enough concrete progress has been made” and “not all parties are equally energetic and/or involved”, it said. Some companies are said to have participated mainly for “marketing reasons” or “to see what happens”.
It also proved difficult to track whether the companies in the pact were adhering to the agreements at all, because some refused to provide the necessary information. They “didn’t answer” when investigators knocked for information, concluded a committee to monitor progress.
“The pact was a bit ahead of its time,” says Chris Bruijnes, director of the Sustainable Packaging Knowledge Institute and member of that committee. He saw that the pact helped to get sustainable initiatives going, but that the non-binding agreements were ultimately not enough. “You need more to achieve the really big goals.”
Recycling companies are on the verge of collapse
Lotte van Grol also thinks so, who was on the pact’s steering group on behalf of environmental organization Natuur & Milieu. In addition to the pact, clear policy was needed from The Hague or Brussels, she thinks. “I hope this is a wake-up call. We have to say: ‘It’s very nice that we make these kinds of agreements with each other, but the context must also be there.'”
She hopes that the government will focus more on reusing packaging. In addition, it is still too expensive to make plastic with recycled material. Van Grol points to the bankruptcy of Umincorp, a company that processes household waste to make plastic granules. These can be used to make plastic products, but using ‘new’ plastic from petroleum is cheaper.
“That company was a shining example of how we would like it to be, but they still failed,” says Van Grol. According to her, the use of new plastic must therefore be made less attractive, so that the use of recycled material becomes the “new normal”. That is far from being the case: other recycling companies are as well say that they are regarding to collapse.
EU legislation in the making
Legislation is being prepared in both The Hague and Brussels that might help. The European Union wants to require a certain percentage of recycled material in plastic packaging from 2030, while the Netherlands wants to introduce such an obligation three years earlier.
In the coming years, the Packaging Waste Fund hopes to ensure greater use of recycled plastic. The fund receives payments from companies that market plastic packaging. Since this year, they have been receiving a discount if they make their packaging easily recyclable, or if they already use recycled plastic in it themselves.
The aim is to no longer use fossil raw materials in plastic packaging by 2050, says Waste Fund director Hester Klein Lankhorst. Recycling must then be the norm, supplemented by new bioplastics. But this still requires a lot of innovation. “Plastic is still a bit of an adolescent compared to paper,” says Klein Lankhorst.
New techniques are still needed to recycle plastic better, and collection also needs to be a lot better. A lot of plastic is currently still too contaminated to be reused. It then ends up in the incinerator. “That always gives me a pain in my stomach, you should know that,” says Klein Lankhorst. “It’s such a shame not to reuse those materials.”
Her advice: put your plastic neatly separated in the PMD bag or container. Municipalities can help people with this, says Klein Lankhorst. “If the plastic is collected from home, people are inclined to separate it better. If they have to take it somewhere, it becomes a hassle. Then people are less inclined to separate it properly.”
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