As the bioplastics market grows, it is essential to address the issue of recycling biodegradable bioplastics and to study their most effective recycling pathways, to be able to manage bioplastic products at their end of life. Bioplastic waste does not yet constitute a relevant amount of the total plastic waste (being only 1% in weight). In the past years, several projects, BioSupPack is one of them, have been funded by the Horizon Programme for Research and Innovation and the Circular Bio-based Europe (CBE) Joint Undertaking to improve and upscale bioplastics’ recycling technologies especially for biobased applications related to packaging (BIOMAC).

Recently, in the second half of 2024, three additional projects, MoeBIOS, ReBioCycle and PROSPER, have kicked off, to bring upscaling of recycling technologies for bioplastics even further. This event goal was to connect experts working on novel or improved recycling technologies for bioplastics from academia and the private sector, offering expertise along the whole process of bioplastics waste management from the foundation (e.g., waste sorting and pretreatment, creation of value chains) to recycling technologies.

The presentations at this event have revolved around the several recycling technologies, e.g., mechanical recycling, chemical recycling, enzymatic and microbial recycling. During the matchmaking session, the audience asked many questions to the invited experts, Miriam Lorenzo Navarro (ITENE), Wouter Post (Wageningen University & Research) and Jan Pels (TORWASH),, mostly revolving around why there is a need to improve recycling technologies for bioplastics that are already biodegradable.

There are many reuse scenarios for bioplastics, and bioplastic products should be designed with realistic reuse possibilities and with an efficient and appropriate end-of-life solution in mind that is scientifically proven to minimise its environmental impact. All experts agreed that the main challenge for bioplastics not being recycled lies not within its biobased and biodegradable characteristics but with the fact that there needs to be more scale to set up a compelling business case for sorting and subsequent recycling. And this is why the CBE partnership has funded the MoeBIOS, ReBioCycle and PROSPER projects.

For BioSupPack, Chrysa Argeiti and Eva Georgiadou of the Agricultural University Athens presented plasma technology, which has a dual role: it is used for pre-treatment of brewers’ spent grains and for the degradation of PHB-based packaging. Enzymatic recycling is introduced as an end-of-life scenario in which plasma technology induces partial depolymerization and oxidation of the PHB material, enhancing the enzymatic conversion to bioplastic monomers. The produced hydrolysate is then introduced as feedstock for producing new PHAs. Ronny Salcedo (EVERSIA) for BIOMAC closed the event with a summary focusing on the challenges for the bioplastic packaging industry.

The following resources have been made available after the event and are in open access: