The European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) has signed the Declaration of the Circular Plastics Alliance, the trade group has announced.

The Circular Plastics Alliance is an EU-wide voluntary initiative that aims to increase recycling and the uptake of recycled plastics in the economic bloc by 2025. CEFIC said the chemical industry can play a leading role by scaling up chemical recycling technology.

At present, the only recycling technology available at large scale is mechanical recycling but this process cannot handle all types of plastic waste. Chemical recycling can process lower-quality, mixed or contaminated plastic waste and break it down into chemical substances, including monomers, which can be used again as feedstock.

“Chemical recycling is a game changer for plastic recycling as it means that more types of plastics can be transformed into new material. Scaling up this technology will make Europe the global leader in circular economy solutions,” said CEFIC president Daniele Ferrari. “Complementing mechanical with chemical recycling will be essential to solve the EU plastic waste problem and achieve the Alliance’s target of having 10 million t of recycled plastic put back into products by 2025.”

The Alliance launched on Dec. 11, 2018 and the declaration has now been signed by more than 90 EU trade associations, companies, public authorities and member states involved in the plastics value chains. The signatories have made several commitments in areas such as design for recycling, collection and sorting, increasing the uptake of recycled content, defining R&D and investment needs, and setting up a system to monitor the volumes of recycled plastics used in European products.