Suez Environnement opens lab for plastics recycling

Waste management firm Suez Environnement, based in Paris, is building a lab through its SITA subsidiary that will focus on devising ways to increase the recycling of plastics. The company says the goal of the lab, called Plast’lab, is to help the company double the production of recycled plastics over the next five years.

The company says it has already developed a process whereby it is capable of sorting and preparing more than 400,000 metric tons of plastic scrap each year, 135,000 metric tons of which are recycled at its nine plastics recycling plants.

To grow this sector, Suez is working on developing partnerships with industries that are major consumers of plastic to jointly develop more effective solutions for processing and delivering more high-quality recycled plastic.

At Plast’lab, Suez says it will be possible to analyze, test and classify different types of plastics while formulating new ranges of plastics from recycled plastics that meet manufacturers’ demands. Suez says the lab will focus on the manufacturers’ demand to obtain and secure the necessary plastic materials while optimizing their formulation.

Suez says the production of plastics in Europe has multiplied 150-fold over the past 50 years and continues to increase. At the same time, the company says only about 25 percent of the 25 million metric tons of plastic scrap produced is recycled. However, current changes to regulations at both national and local levels are setting ambitious new recycling targets, notably a household packaging recycling rate of 80 percent.