The Belgian Association of Manufacturers of Plastic and Rubber Products, known as Federplast.be, and the Flemish waste authority Ovam, which formed a joint working group last year to study possibilities for plastics recycling, will run a seminar on the topic next week.
Belgium claims the highest plastics manufacturing tonnage per inhabitant in the world. The country already handles 92% of plastics waste: 30% by mechanical recycling and 62% by incineration with energy recovery. The remaining 8% is land filled in a controlled way,” said Geert Scheys,?secretary general of Federplast.be, told Packaging Today.
Harm caused by uncontrolled plastics waste has been hitting the headlines recently EU moves to end ‘plastics soup’ and Movie puts plastics industry ‘in the soup’). Mr Scheys says the main sources of plastics waste are international navigation, fishery practices and countries without effective collection and treatment infrastructure for waste in general and for plastics waste particularly.
“This is indeed a global issue which in my view requires global approaches similar to the Montreal and Kyoto protocols. If, for example, the Belgian green dot system would be extended all over the world, the financial means would be available to develop in all countries similar plastics waste collection and treatment approaches as we have,” said Mr Scheys.
