Plastics Unwrapped – Détails, épisodes et analyse

The Asia Pacific region tends to dominate the rankings and headlines in coverage surrounding global plastic waste. But the pace of innovation and change in plastics production, consumption and waste in the region has been faster than you think, led by China. In this episode Junice Yeo, Executive Director at Eco-Business, discusses the real challenges facing Asia’s disparate countries and investments in policies to address the region’s varying degrees of waste challenges. Thomas Luedi, Senior Partner at Bain & Company, and Kodak Xiao, Global Sustainability Director for the Packaging and Specialty Plastics business at Dow, add industry perspective on balancing the rising production of recycling capacities, increasing patent-filing rates in the region for innovations, and Asia-Pacific's new hyper-aware consumer. 

From compostable fashion developed in the Middle East to simplifying waste into feedstock in Switzerland to reduce fossil fuels in plastics, entrepreneurs David Roubach and Felix Bobbink share their journey of being disrupters in an industry grappling with waste management. But as Dow Global Business Director Christophe Marché explains, scaling disruptive solutions will require incumbent industry leaders to take risks, invest in disrupters and pivot their business models. University of California, Berkeley professor Dr. Ting Xu shares how it will also require the industry to look into the research and science behind scalable solutions.

This episode delves into the need to reduce CO2 emissions in the plastics industry and how Dow is working towards producing circular plastics with a lower CO2 footprint. Marco Ten Bruggencate is joined by Howard Chase and Erika Sánchez Garrido, from Dow, and Kaj Embren, a sustainable development expert. They discuss why the decade between 2020 to 2030 is crucial in terms climate protection and how ‘The Greta effect’ has caused public consciousness around CO2 levels to grow, sparking a rise in demand for industry action. 

Key discussion points include: 

1. Dow's partnership with Shell to transform furnaces and electrify energy (07:04-07:30)
2. How The EU Green deal is encouraging and enabling innovation (10:36-11:02)
3. The need for education to meet the low carbon economy goals (27:44 – 28:11)

In this episode, Dow’s Director of EU Affairs, Dennis Kredler, is joined by Plastic Europe’s Director of External Affairs, David Carroll, to discuss the EU’s Green Deal and what it means for the plastics industry. Dennis and David discuss the content and ambitions of the Green Deal, the opportunities and challenges it presents for the plastic industry and what actions organisations such as Dow are taking to ensure they meet the Green Deal’s goal of circularity and climate neutrality by 2050.

Tune in to Episode 5 of Plastics Unwrapped to hear an open discussion on the opportunities and challenges we face with plastic waste in Africa and an exploration into how key collaborations are shifting the dial on collecting, sorting and recycling rates to build an effective circular economy. Adwoa Coleman, Africa Sustainability & Advocacy Manager from Dow’s Plastics business, joins Arese Lucia Onaghise, Executive Secretary at The Food and Beverage Recycling Alliance (FBRA) and Keiran Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of recycling company, Mr. Green Africa, to talk about the landscape for plastics on the continent.

In this episode, Carsten Larsen, Dow’s Commercial Director for Recycling in EMEA & APAC is  joined by Iain Gulland, CEO of Zero Waste Scotland, and Sirt Mellema, CEO of Fuenix Ecogy Group, to discuss ‘game-changing’ advanced recycling technology. 

Advanced recycling takes hard-to-recycle, mixed plastic waste and breaks it down into its basic chemical elements – allowing waste to become infinitely recyclable. The panel look at what this technology means for both industry and consumers.

Key discussion points include:

1. What is advanced or feedstock recycling ?
2. How to recycle plastics that were previously unrecyclable.
3. Advanced recycling in a circular economy.

Why is it so difficult to recycle plastics? What is the difference between recyclable and recycled? Why do recycling rates change so drastically from country to country and even street to street? Dow's Romain Cazenave, Marketing Director for Packaging & Specialty Plastics in EMEA, and Karin Katzer, Marketing Director in EMEA, shed light on this topic and explain how plastic manufacturers can create products that are easier to recycle as well as support recycling systems. They are joined by Krzysztof Krajewski, Director of Packaging Sustainability at RB, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies.

Key discussion points include:

1. Why recycling rates differ from so much between areas
2. The role of plastics manufacturers in creating products that are easier to recycle, as well as supporting recycling.

Dow's Thomas Reutter, Product Director for Packaging & Specialty Plastics in EMEA, and Panu Routasalo, Vice President at UPM Biofuels, talk about market growth for renewable feedstocks and how this fits with the industry’s plans to reduce its carbon emissions. They discuss why approaches like mass balance are important in supporting market growth for bioplastics, as well as the industry's role in ensuring the growth of renewable feedstocks and the need to continue working together with others to find more sustainable solutions.

Key discussion points include: 

1. What are renewable feedstocks?
2. Potential challenges of feedstocks as an industry solution (8:28 - 8:47)

Dow’s  Marco ten Bruggencate, Commercial Vice President for Packaging & Specialty Plastics in EMEA, and Carsten Larsen, Commercial Director for Plastic Recycling in EMEA, are joined by Jim McClelland, Editor of SustMeme magazine, to discuss ‘Emotion versus Science’ and how that plays out in today’s debate around plastics. Our guests discuss how we can balance the emotional response we all feel when seeing waste, with a logical, scientific approach when it comes to choosing materials.

Key discussion points include: 

1. Whether the industry is doing enough to combat the negative (20:58-21:21)
2. How we can demonstrate the benefits of circular plastic (10:42-11:19)
3. The role of the value chain (8:13-8:41)

In Recycling and Beyond Part 2, Haley Lowry, Global Sustainability Director at Dow, and Jeroen Verhoeven, Vice President of Value Chain Development at Neste, discuss the quiet industry collaborations that are helping companies break out of their silos to achieve their sustainability targets. We explore the potential behind this collaborative approach in rebalancing carbon and circularity challenges the industry is facing and what solutions could comprise disruptive mechanical and advanced recycling business models.

We take a look at how a collaborative approach can allow companies to keep each other honest in their sustainability efforts, scale technologies and create the right policy and regulatory frameworks to help the industry redefine the inputs used to make plastics, including fossil fuels.