Plastic pollution became and continues to be a vast human made environmental disaster. This white paper provides you with a perspective on and navigator for transforming the plastics industry into a more future proof and circular industry basing upon more broad circular economy standard works, that show the possibilities and necessities for implementing a circular business model, incl. e.g. the 7R’s (rethink, reduce, re-use, repair, refurbish, recover, recycle).
This white paper starts with an overview on the plastics industry, its pollution and its primary sustainability path of closing the technological cycle. Then the first progress, status and concepts of the technological cycle solutions are highlighted. As a complement, this white paper looks at closing the biological cycle as a further option. It finds that, although a biological cycle sounds counter intuitive for plastics at first, there are relevant fields of application where this should be considered.
In its last section, it is found that the transformation towards a more sustainable (circular) economy, including plastics, requires a lot of change management. To highlight this, a framework for assessing the best options for levers (from applications until materials across all phases of the value chain) are introduced by giving examples. On top of that, the positions of the industry, public hand as well as consumers are briefly outlined, underlining that this transformation is vast, needs leadership and prioritization.
In essence, this white paper shall be a contribution for understanding and prioritizing the circular transformation needed regarding plastics.