A new study from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) has developed technical recommendations for EU-wide end-of-waste (EoW) criteria for plastic waste. The work is meant to serve as a foundation for the Commission to draft future legislation with the ultimate aim of promoting recycling and the uptake of secondary raw materials while minimising the environmental impact of plastic waste.
According to the study, the EU’s Waste Framework Directive (WFD) states that when establishing the EoW criteria, the Commission "shall take as a starting point the most stringent and environmentally protective of those criteria” that exist in the member states.
In 2022, based on a JRC scoping study, the European Commission drew up a priority list of promising waste streams for which it intended to develop EU-wide EoW criteria. Plastic waste was ranked "as the first priority stream”, according to the JRC.
The recommendations in the current document focus on "all thermoplastic polymer waste and blends of thermoplastic polymer waste, regardless of the polymer type and source”. The aim is to establish clear criteria to determine the point in the recycling process at which waste plastics lose "waste” status and gain "product" status, having become valueable recycled raw materials....
