World Environment Day - Veolia is committed to beating plastic pollution
“Beat plastic pollution” is the theme of this year’s World Environment Day. Veolia is looking to significantly step up its plastic recycling work in order to meet this sizeable environmental challenge.
Plastic is the third most produced material by humankind, after cement and steel. Plastic is now an essential part of all areas of everyday life and global production is set to quadruple by 2050, reaching 1.1 billion tonnes. Less than 10% of plastic waste is recycled worldwide at the present time, and roughly one-third of plastic packaging ends up in the natural environment, particularly seas and oceans, where it takes close to a thousand years to decompose. Veolia is reaffirming its stated ambition in response to this issue: reinvent the plastics market by making it circular.
“We want to shape a global plastics recycling and recovery industry to offer a credible alternative to new plastic. Consequently, Veolia is planning to increase the amount of plastic it recycles five-fold by 2025. With over 250,000 tonnes of plastic recycled, Veolia is already one of the leading players in the European plastics recycling market,” explained Veolia CEO Antoine Frérot when speaking to the press in October 2017.
Developing innovative sorting solutions and promoting eco-design
Veolia is developing innovative solutions enabling sorting performance to be optimized via automation and artificial intelligence in order to achieve this objective.
The group is also helping to develop eco-design in which products make use of recycled plastic. In partnership with manufacturers, the group is testing the physical properties and colorimetric features of new recycled resins in order to make them into new products.
Finally, in 2017 Veolia opened a new research centre dedicated to plastic waste recycling.
