Clearpoint Recycling Predictions for 2025.

Here are our top 4 recycling predictions for 2025

As the year is coming to an end Clearpoint Recycling is starting to look forward to 2025 and how some of the biggest trends in recycling are likely to impact the market, here are our top 4 recycling predictions for 2025.

Recycling Prediction 1: The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive starts to have real influence on the market.

Since its inception in 1994 the EU Packaging Directive (click this link to the directive) has evolved and developed significantly, some might say too much to make it either understandable or enforceable but we can discuss this on another day! Its latest evolution came in November 2022 with these latest rules kicking in from January 1^st 2025. As with all legislation the content is both dense and open to interpretation and it certainly has been over the past 2 years. However what has been academic now becomes real as the EU Member States look to enforce it as law. This really underpins most of the recycling predictions as this framework is driving much of the investment across the industry

In particular 2025 is a key year for the Single Use Plastics Directive which stipulates that 25% of PET bottles should come from recycled plastics by then, rising to 30% by 2030. While there still remains a lot of uncertainty about how this requirement will be measured and enforced the market is reacting to this news. Not least by talking down the expected impact on prices of feedstock. However with the UK still reliant on the taxation as the stick to increase use of recycled materials there will no doubt a shift in demand from the UK into Europe.

How and if this directive is enforced, measured, maintained, restricted, implemented and all the other things that needs to happen to make legislation effective remains to be seen. But 2025 could well be the turning point for the use of recycled content in packaging from which the UK and EU market can’t turn back.

Recycling Prediction 2: Increased Focus on Chemical Recycling

For anyone that has written predictions in recycling over the past decade will have included reference to Chemical Recycling, probably with the view that; this is the year it finally gains market traction! So why is 2025 any different? The answer links back to the point above with the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation that targets 50% recycling from plastic recycling by 2025. The full breakdown of targets are shown below:

With current targets set at 25% (half the expected level for 2025) something significant is clearly needed to move the needle which has been stuck, stubbornly, at 40% since 2021. With 16.13 million tonnes of plastic waste generated annually, this increase of 1.6m isn’t going to come easily without a step change in how material is recycled.

With a further 2.6bn Euros committed to investment in 2025, rising to 8bn Euro by 2030 there seems no end to the commitment from key players in the chemical and oil industry to build what is expected to be a 47bn Euro by the end of the decade. 2025 could see the point when input capacity tips over the 1m metric tonnes, delivering a sizable chunk of the current shortfall in the EU’s 2025 target. As they say; “where there is billons of Euros there is a way!”

Recycling Prediction 3: Closer scrutiny on plastics incineration

While the recent article by the BBC may have been slightly misleading when pointing to the fact that waste to energy incineration is now the “dirtiest” form of power generation (a status only achieved on the closure of the last coal fire power plant in the UK) – read our view here. There is no doubt that the levels of plastics being burnt for electricity is not sustainable and with the help of the media likely to become unpalatable for the general public.

As we covered in our recent article a deeper dive does place the ultimate blame for this problem with the general public who are still refusing to keep sufficient levels of plastics from general waste (the only waste stream currently being burnt). However this doesn’t change the fact that any waste to energy producer who isn’t currently diverting plastics from the stream prior to burning will have to approach this differently, not least in advance of the changes to carbon credit trading due in 2028.

Greater public pressure, coupled with commercial costs will only go so far while the infrastructure to deal with this diverted stream remains incapable of recycling it. Clearpoint Recycling are already seeing key European players looking at this as a viable option for cost effective feedstocks and investment in this space across mainland Europe is expected to accelerate during 2025.

This story is likely to rumble on and if not addressed risks undermining at home separation of materials further; “since it is all getting burnt anyway”. Definitely one to watch!

Recycling Prediction 4: DRS (Deposit Return Scheme) hitting the buffers.  

On the surface DRS makes total sense and further role out would have been on most recycling predictions list of past years. It also feeds into a comforting narrative that 50 years ago we used to collect our shilling on a bottle of pop from the corner shop. We know that separation of plastics at source makes them between 12 and 13 times more likely to be recycled. And with the story above being that they are just being burnt gaining traction the whole process for capturing plastic bottles at source could be threatened.

Unfortunately there are always consequences to even the best of intentions and it seems that with the introduction of key schemes across Europe these are starting to show themselves. We are hearing a growing level of concern from sorters and processors questioning how they can continue to operate without the high quality bottle PET reaching them. By diverting this from the combined plastics waste stream, yes these bottles are more likely to be recycled but these are the gold nuggets many processors rely upon in the stream of s**t they have to deal with daily.

By removing this value at source the remainder no longer hold sufficient commercial value to justify doing anything other than incineration, and with this facing greater pressure, does this leave landfill?

With the extended deadline for the introduction of the UK scheme fast approaching in 2025 (delayed due to Covid and Cost of Living) the chances of the scheme being implemented in the next 12 months remain slim. However with each year that passes, more data is being provided from areas where DRS has been implemented and this more nuanced NET evaluation of overall good could well see future scheme put on hold indefinitely.