Plastic Pipes Conference Association # 2023 Lake Buena Vista
Ludo Debever , Peter Sejersen
The Circular Plastics Alliance is an initiative under the European Strategy for Plastics. TEPPFA is one of more than 300 signatures for the Alliance. We thereby committed to a significant contribution to boosting the EU market for recycled plastics to 10 million tonnes by 2025. Moreover, one of the must win battles of the new industry strategy is to contribute to the circular economy by paving the way to increase the use of recycled content whilst maintaining the performance of the systems.
The use of recycled materials in new products is scientifically recognized as one of the major tools to reduce the carbon footprint and to transition from a linear to a circular economy. The European plastic pipe industry is already now using more than 400.000 tons recycled materials per year in new products, which represents an average content of 10% in the products. The recycled materials are almost solely used in non-pressure products.
Although the industry is working for an increased uptake of recycled materials, we wanted a holistic view of our options to mitigate the climate change. We have therefore commissioned a study to elaborate and quantify our options.
To conduct the study a third-party company was chosen. The company is a global sustainability consultancy company that can combine broad and deep sustainability expertise with robust commercial and operational capabilities. Anthesis was supported by World Wildlife Fund in Switzerland who acted as a “critical friend and sparring partner” to us and secured us the correct focus throughout the project.
The study had three main components: A membership survey, a sectorial footprint study and a mitigation scenario study based on a hotspot analysis. We explored a set of potential ‘mitigation scenarios’, which could reduce the impact of the sector:
- Introduce recycled material
- Introduce biobased material
- Reduce metal parts in fittings and ancillary components
- Greener energy schemes for virgin material providers
- Recovery of pipes for further recycling
When all scenarios are applied together, the potential reduction could be 3-3.5 Mt CO2eq 25-30% of current carbon emissions.
The paper will explain our findings in detail and also show the likely implementation costs, compared with the global abatement cost benchmarks from the International Energy Agency
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