The pandemic will not stop the circular economy

In the current crisis the sustainable use of resources is not centre stage. The top priority now is to do everything to overcome it. However, the pandemic also shows that the use of plastics must be improved if the world is not to be inundated by waste.   

As the amount of plastic products escalates so too the volume of waste also rises. Most articles used in hospitals or doctors' practices are properly separated and disposed of, be it by incineration or recycling. A major part of the additional waste from households, however, ends up being an added burden on the environment. The environmental protection organisation Oceans Asia, which has collected and analysed the washed-up waste at a little beach near Hong Kong for a long time, found some 70 washed-up surgical masks on the one hundred metres wide stretch every day.  

So plastic waste is soaring while the growth of global plastic production is slowed down by COVID-19. In the EU production even slumped in the first half of 2020. One reason was a perceivable downswing in important buyer industries such as the automotive sector or the construction industry. Summer saw a recovery set in but the European plastics association Plastics Europe expects output to fail to achieve pre-COVID levels before 2022. On top of this, industry's dwindling demand paired with the also pandemic-related dramatic slump in oil prices has caused a price erosion for new plastic goods – not only in Europe.

In Europe, China, the USA and other parts of the world plastic recycling and the circular economy have been gaining momentum for years now. Some are concerned about the consequences of the giant plastic soup covering our global oceans on the food chain. Others no longer want to be surrounded by heaps of waste that cause disease and hamper economic growth. Yet others view the circular economy as a lucrative business opportunity. This is why more and more players are jumping on the bandwagon in the plastics value chain. The world’s largest chemical combine BASF, for example, one of the biggest plastics manufacturers, announced it would double its sales to EUR 17 billion by 2030 with solutions for the circular economy amidst the COVID crisis. From 2025 250,000 tons of recycled and waste-based raw materials are to be processed instead of fossil raw materials.  

The recycling trend will not be reversed. It will only be slowed down by the pandemic. As soon as the global crisis is overcome, plastics recycling will also pick up speed again. After all, the challenges of a constantly growing world population can only be met if management is sustainable and resources are saved in many fields. This is being realised across the board – and also reflected by the number of world-class patents in the field of recycling. According to a 2019 study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, China had filed 2,837 patents, followed by the USA with 2,289 and, taken together, Germany, France and Great Britain with 1,529 patents. In view of such large number of innovations it becomes clear that plastic recycling is regarded as indispensable to the future – and, as a result, the circular economy for plastics, too.