The event titled “Recycling Strategies for Bioplastics: What’s Next?” was organized by European Bioplastics as a side event for the #EBC24, the annual European Bioplastics Conference. It took place in Berlin on December 9, 2024.
The goal of the event was to bring together experts in novel or improved bioplastic recycling technologies from both academia and the private sector. Participants shared their expertise on the entire bioplastics waste management process, covering aspects from waste sorting and pretreatment to the establishment of value chains and recycling technologies. In the past years, several projects such as BioSupPack, have been funded by the Horizon Programme for Research and Innovation and the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) to improve and upscale bioplastics’ recycling technologies, especially for biobased applications related to packaging. This is also the case for BIOMAC, which also participated in the event. The plans for newly started projects in the second half of 2024 –ReBioCycle, MoeBIOS – were also presented.
Chrysa Argeiti and Eva Georgiadou ( Agricultural University of Athens) represented BioSupPack and delivered a presentation about the “Pre-treatment of packaging waste with plasma technology”. The rest of the presentations revolved around mechanical, chemical, enzymatic and microbial recycling technologies.
Following the presentations, the audience was able to exchange with the speakers in a matchmaking session with Chrysa Argeiti and Eva Georgiadou (AUA), Jan Pels (TORWASH), Miriam Lorenzo Navarro (ITENE), Ronny S. (EVERSIA) and Wouter Post (Wageningen University & Research) regarding the need to improve recycling technologies for bioplastics that are already biodegradable.
A clear conclusion of the event was the acknowledgement of many reuse scenarios for bioplastics and the need for bioplastic products to be designed with realistic reuse possibilities in mind and with an efficient and appropriate end-of-life solution scientifically proven to minimise its environmental impact. All experts agreed that the main challenge for bioplastics not being recycled lies not within its biobased and biodegradable characteristics but with the need for more scale to set up a compelling business case for sorting and subsequent recycling.
Several resources are now available in open access if you missed the event:
✅ Introductory document: https://zenodo.org/records/14231054
✅ Presentations of the event: https://zenodo.org/records/14384110
✅ Recording of the event (approx. 1 hour): https://youtu.be/DtbKQxHc3ag
