To help the European plastics industry fulfil its commitment of using 10 Mt of recycled plastics  by 2025, PolyREC® continued to collect data from European plastics recyclers and converters on their recycling tonnages and use of recycled plastics.

PolyREC® is very thankful to the 317 companies that choose RecoTrace® to record their 2022 tonnages.

For 2022, recyclers reported approximately 1.6 Mt of plastic waste as gross input to European recyclers, and approximately 1.4 Mt as net input. Around 1.3 Mt was reported as recycling output. About 65.8% of the net input, and 59.5% of the output reported to RecoTrace® by European recyclers are Recovinyl and EuCertPlast certified.

Participants reported 856.1 kt of recycled plastics used in conversion, supplied by European recyclers. Additionally, 820.6 kt of recycled plastics in new products were reported, of which 85% were sold on the European market, mostly in Building and Construction (72%). About 54.2% of the conversion input data, and 42.2% of the conversion output data reported to RecoTrace® were audited.

PVC still represents the majority of the data input. PolyREC® expects that an increasing number of recyclers and converters, representing other polymers, will find their way to RecoTrace® in the coming years’ data collections, thereby reinforcing the representativeness of the polymer split in the aggregated results.

2022 RecoTrace® results are available here.