New plastic waste guide aims for 100% circular packaging by 2050

The Waste Fund Packaging foundation presented a new Plastic Guide that aims to help municipalities, importers, producers, and recyclers work towards a packaging system that is 100% fossil free with 0% damage to people and the environment in 2050. The guide focuses on reducing plastic packaging to only necessary applications. And the remaining packaging must be high quality, reusable, and easily recyclable.

According to Hester Klein Lankhorst of the Waste Fund, plastic is simply too useful to ditch altogether. “Light, hygienic, strong, and it keeps products fresh and prevents food waste,” she said. “We need plastic for a sustainable future, for example, in solar panels, light vehicles, and against food waste. The downside is that the more plastic we use, the greater the harmful effects on our environment and health.”

The Netherlands needs to find a balance between the advantages and disadvantages of plastic, and that requires more than just optimizing or innovating the current system, the foundation said. It requires “different thinking and handling of the production and use of plastic packaging.”

The Plastic Guide sets goals for a society that uses less plastic packaging by only using it for essential applications. By reducing and reusing plastic packaging and preventing litter, fossil raw materials will no longer be needed to create plastic packaging.

That will require producers to increase the quality of their packaging. Municipalities responsible for waste collection will have to improve their collection systems and make them more uniform so that Netherlands residents know what is expected of them when they dispose of plastic packaging and to make managing quality easier. “This is only possible with one or two national, uniform systems” instead of the current variety of different municipal systems and “good communication to citizens,” the foundation said.

“In the future, consumers must be able to count on the fact that if there is plastic packaging around a product, it is really necessary and that the packaging will not cause damage to people and the environment. In addition, there will be more packaging that you as a consumer can refill yourself.”