Mechanical Recycling is currently the dominant recycling technique for post-consumer plastic packaging waste. Sorting and reprocessing technologies are available in most EU Member States with varying levels of recycling quotas. EU waste legislation requires binding recycling targets in the future.
Recycling biobased plastics increases the fossil carbon reduction potential by keeping the renewable carbon in the material cycle even longer. Drop-in biobased plastics with the same chemical structure are already mechanically recycled together with their fossil-based counterparts. Innovative biobased plastics with new chemical structures can be commercially recycled once their amounts in the waste streams become high enough to make this feasible from an economic point of view. For some of these biobased plastics mechanical recycling already takes place at small scale.