Last year, RecoTrace® experienced a critical transformation to help the European plastics industry fulfil its commitment of 10 Mt recycled plastics use by 2025, by evolving from a PVC industry specific into a multi-polymer data collection tool.
PolyREC® is very thankful to the 280 companies who choose RecoTrace® to record their 2021 recycling tonnages and recycled plastics use.

For last year’s data collection, there was a strong participation of recyclers, reporting ~1.9 Mt of plastic waste as gross input to European recyclers, and ~1.6 Mt as net input. A ~1.4 Mt was reported as recycling output.
Participants reported 530.6 kt of recycled plastics used in conversion, of which 89% were supplied by European recyclers. In addition, 571.8 kt of recycled plastics in new products were reported, of which 85% were sold on the European market, mostly in Building and Construction (60%) and Packaging (12.5%) applications.

About 64% of the participating recyclers are EuCertPlast or RecyClass certified. ~65% of the conversion input data, and ~61% of the conversion output data reported to RecoTrace® were audited.

Since it is the first year RecoTrace® opens to additional polymer types, PVC still represents most of the data input. PolyREC® trusts an increasing number of recyclers and converters, representing other polymers, will find their way to RecoTrace™ in the following years’ data collections, reinforcing the representativeness of the polymer split in the aggregated results.

2021 RecoTrace® results are available here.