EU to unify SUPD and PPWR with broader definition of ‘recycling’

The European Union has two major policies concerning single-use plastic beverage bottles: the Single-Use Plastics Directive (SUPD) and the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (PPWR).

The SUPD entered into force in July 2021; the PPWR became law in February 2025.

The SUPD sets recycled content targets for PET bottles of at least 25% by 2025 and of 30% for all single-use plastic beverage bottles by 2030. The PPWR also sets a 30% recycled content target for all single-use plastic beverage bottles by 2030.

The Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2023/2683 of November 2023 implements rules for the application of the SUPD. According to that act, the 25% target for PET ‘can only be achieved using post-consumer plastic waste generated from plastic products that have been placed in the EU market,’ a spokesperson for the European Commission told Sustainable Plastics. That confirms that plastic waste from outside the EU cannot currently count towards SUPD targets.

The PPWR, on the other hand, allows for post-consumer plastic waste from outside the EU to count towards its targets, under some conditions.

Paragraphs 3(a) and 3(b) of article 7 set out the PPWR’s controversial ‘mirror clause’. This clause states that if imported plastic is to count towards meeting the PPWR’s recycling content targets, it must be collected in line with EU standards for separate collection and then processed in facilities that comply with the same pollution and emissions limits that apply to domestic producers.

The SUPD and the PPWR are thus not in line when it comes to waste feedstock.

Moreover, the PPWR’s definition of ‘recycling’ refers back to Directive 2008/98/EC, which leaves the legal status of chemical recycling uncertain, particularly for pyrolysis. The SUPD, on the other hand, is explicit in only recognising mechanically recycled material as counting towards its targets.

A spokesperson told Sustainable Plastics that the European Commission is preparing an implementing act that ‘will extend the calculation, verification, and reporting methodology to cover all recycling technologies, including chemical recycling’. That act will repeal and replace the existing one, aligning the SUPD and the PPWR.

The broader definition of ‘recycled plastic’ will cover recyclates made from post-consumer plastic waste placed on markets outside the EU.

The implementation act is expected in the fourth quarter of 2025. It will also have its say on accounting methodologies like mass balance, critical to chemical recycling technologies like pyrolysis. Previous reports suggest that a ‘vast majority’ of EU member states are in favour of adopting a fuel-exempt mass balance approach.

In mass balance, a certified volume of renewable or recycled material is input across a production run but may not be evenly distributed across each individual product output.

Using the mass balance method allows economic operators to state that they use a certain percentage of recycled or renewable material in their products, without having to prove that each individual product produced has that percentage of recycled or renewable material.

Given that pyrolysis oil is blended with virgin feedstocks in a cracker, and that the two feedstocks cannot be physically separated once co-fed, many argue that recognising mass balance is essential for allocating recycled content via this chemical recycling technology. 

source: Sustainable Plastics

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : NETL Researchers to convert PE waste into a graphite feedstock for EV batteries

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

NETL Research Funded To Transform Waste Plastic Into High-Quality Graphite

NETL has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Critical Materials Innovation Hub to expand research that transforms single-use water bottles, shopping bags and other waste plastic into a valuable, unconventional feedstock for manufacturing high-quality graphite.

“Graphite is a critical mineral needed by U.S. manufacturers to produce lithium-ion battery anodes for vehicles, military drones, backup power systems and more,” said NETL researcher Yuan Gao. “Working with partners through the DOE Critical Materials Innovation Hub will help establish a strong domestic supply chain of high-quality graphite while transforming polyethylene (PE) waste into a valuable resource.”

NETL’s unique process provides a simple method to turn PE into graphite that is comparable or higher quality than commercially available synthetic graphite.

The process diverts single-use plastics and other PE waste from the world’s oceans and landfills into the manufacturing sector, where it can be utilized for beneficial, revenue-generating purposes and help generate a strong domestic supply of a critical mineral needed to support U.S. national and economic security.

Funds awarded through the DOE Critical Materials Innovation Hub will enable NETL’s Carbon Materials Manufacturing team to continue a partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ames National Laboratory and Ingevity, a global corporation headquartered in North Charleston, South Carolina.

The partnership was launched in January 2024 to convert PE waste and lignin (biomass generated by paper manufacturing and other plant-based industries) into pure and highly crystalline graphite suitable for energy-related applications, including battery anodes for fast-charging application in electric vehicles.

The goal of the upcoming work is to convert biomass-derived carbon and plastic waste-derived carbon char into graphite using a simplified chemical process that employs machine learning to screen process variables and determine the optimal value to use for each.

Plastic waste is a global problem that has challenged society for nearly 75 years. More than 7.8 billion tons of plastic have been produced since the 1950s, which is approximately one ton of plastic for every person alive. While some recycling methods exist, they are generally limited to waste streams that are relatively uncontaminated with food, dyes and additives.

Additionally, traditional recycling causes the deterioration of polymer properties. This deterioration means that plastics can only be recycled a few times before their technical and economic value is lost. Due, in part, to these limitations, only 6-7% of the plastic ever produced has been recycled.

NETL’s solution diverts plastics from waste streams into the manufacturing supply chain where the material can be used more beneficially and economically. The newly funded process joins the Lab’s other patent-pending technology to upcycle plastic waste and use it as a manufacturing feedstock for making a range of high-value, solid-carbon materials, including supercapacitors.

“By producing solid carbon materials, such as graphite, from waste plastic, we can sequester the waste in a high-quality product with a longer service life than the single-use plastics it is produced from. In the case of graphite used in batteries, the product can be recovered and reused at the end of device life, which extends the graphite service life even further,” said Christopher Matranga, a senior NETL researcher on the project.

The Critical Materials Innovation Hub was established in 2013 and is led by Ames National Laboratory as a sustained, multidisciplinary effort to develop solutions across the materials life cycle as well as reduce the impact of supply chain disruptions and price fluctuations associated with these valuable resources.

NETL is a DOE national laboratory dedicated to advancing the nation’s energy future by creating innovative solutions that strengthen the security, affordability and reliability of energy systems and natural resources. With laboratories in Albany, Oregon; Morgantown, West Virginia; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, NETL creates advanced energy technologies that support DOE’s mission while fostering collaborations that will lead to a resilient and abundant energy future for the nation.

source: National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL)

Blue Marlin Becomes World’s First Solar-Powered Inland Cargo Vessel

Dutch solar technology company Wattlab and Germany’s HGK Shipping have unveiled the world’s first hybrid inland cargo vessel powered by solar energy.

The vessel, named Blue Marlin, is equipped with 192 solar panels that supply power to both the onboard systems and the vessel’s high-voltage propulsion system. This makes the Blue Marlin the first inland vessel in the world to use solar power directly for movement, not just for basic onboard functions.

HGK Shipping is a major player in European inland waterway shipping, operating a fleet of 350 vessels and transporting around 43 million tonnes of goods every year. The company specialises in the transport of dry bulk, gas, and chemicals across Europe.

Wattlab, known for its work in both inland and seagoing shipping, has been collaborating with HGK Shipping on solar energy projects. In the second quarter of 2024, another vessel from HGK Shipping, the MS Helios, gained attention and made it into the Guinness Book of Records for having the world’s largest solar panel system on an inland cargo vessel.

The MS Helios has 312 solar panels, but its system is limited to supplying low-voltage onboard or hotel systems.

The solar system on the Blue Marlin is more advanced. Unlike the Helios, the Blue Marlin’s solar power setup is fully integrated, meaning it supports both low-voltage systems (like lighting and equipment) and high-voltage systems used for propulsion.

Wattlab’s co-founder and COO, David Kester, described this as a major technical milestone for inland shipping. He said the vessel can now officially be considered the first of its kind to directly use solar energy for sailing.

Under optimal sunlight conditions, the system can deliver up to 35 kilowatts of power. It works alongside four diesel generators that also supply energy to the electric propulsion system. This combined setup allows for what’s known as peak shaving-a method where solar energy and batteries help reduce the need to turn on an extra generator during times of high energy demand.

The Blue Marlin also uses automated energy management, which controls and distributes power where it is needed most, increasing overall efficiency and helping save fuel.

According to Wattlab, when the ship is lightly loaded and sailing downstream, it might even run entirely on solar energy for short periods, a major achievement that has never been done before in inland shipping.

source:Wattlab / Marine Insight

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : Understanding Shrinkage in Injection Molding

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

Understanding Shrinkage in Injection Molding: The Role of the Packing Phase

In injection molding, shrinkage is fundamentally linked to thermal expansion.

However, this relationship can become complex, especially when we factor in the "Packing Phase."

During this phase, we apply significant pressure to the molten material, allowing us to inject more grams of material into a predefined mold volume, assuming we disregard mold deformation for now.

As a result, the final shrinkage can vary widely—ranging from high shrinkage, dictated by the room pressure PvT curve (in cases where no packing is applied), to even negative shrinkage in situations of overpacking.

While the basic principles of shrinkage are driven by Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE), the reality is much more nuanced.

For instance, with glass-filled polymers, increased packing pressure can influence the anisotropy-driven warpage of the material; it may even suppress warpage without affecting the CTE anisotropy itself.

source: Vito leo

BASF and BACHL complete transfer of Styrodur® business to BACHL

BASF has sold its business with Styrodur®, an insulation material made from extruded polystyrene (XPS), to Karl Bachl Kunststoffverarbeitung GmbH & Co. KG (BACHL). Following approval by the relevant authorities, the transaction was completed with effect from June 30, 2025. The sale also includes the brand Styrodur®. The parties have agreed to keep the financial details of the transaction confidential.

Karl Bachl Kunststoffverarbeitung GmbH & Co. KG has already expanded its sales radius in January 2025 by taking over the distribution of Styrodur® products. BACHL is one of the leading manufacturers of insulation materials in Germany and a long-standing Styrodur® sales partner of BASF. The Styrodur® brand is already an established part of BACHL's product portfolio. "We are proud to take over the Styrodur® brand and are extremely confident about its future," says Michael Küblbeck, CEO of BACHL. The BACHL group already has extensive experience with Styrodur®. Karl Bachl Kunststoffverarbeitung GmbH & Co. KG is looking forward to continuing its successful cooperation with customers and partners.

 "BASF is consistently focusing its strategy on expandable polystyrene with our well-known brands Neopor® and Styropor®," said Dr. Klaus Ries, Head of Business Management Styrenics Europe at BASF. "We want to expand our EPS business and further strengthen our position in the market." To this end, BASF will increase Neopor®'s production capacity in Ludwigshafen by 50,000 tons to 250,000 tons per year. The expanded capacity is expected to be available from the beginning of 2027.

source: BASF

Implementation of Japan’s “Positive List” Confirms FDCA Approval for Food-Contact Use

Avantium N.V., a leading company in renewable and circular polymer materials, is pleased to share that Japan has fully implemented its Positive List system for food contact plastics as of 1 June 2025. This list, part of the Food Sanitation Law, includes FDCA (2,5-furandicarboxylic acid) as an approved monomer. As a result, PEF (polyethylene furanoate), a plant-based plastic made from FDCA, is now eligible for use in food-contact applications in Japan, where only substances included on the Positive List are permitted. This is an important step forward for sustainable packaging solutions in one of the world’s key markets.

Japan introduced its Positive List (PL) system for synthetic resins in 2020 to ensure that only safe, approved substances are used in food-contact materials. The now implemented Positive List system places clear emphasis on the individual components used to produce plastics for food packaging. With FDCA now included on Japan’s Positive List, PEF can be more broadly adopted for sustainable food packaging across the Japanese market. This builds on existing food contact approvals already granted in Europe and the United States.

“This is an important milestone for Avantium’s FDCA and PEF,” said Ana Sousa Dias, Manager Product Stewardship and Regulatory Affairs at Avantium. “The implementation of the Positive List with FDCA not only validates the safety of our innovative materials, but also paves the way for broader adoption of PEF in food packaging in Japan. It marks an exciting step forward in bringing circular and renewable solutions to one of the world’s most advanced markets.

source: Avantium

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : Implantable device could save diabetes patients from dangerously low blood sugar

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

Implantable device could save diabetes patients from dangerously low blood sugar

The new implant carries a reservoir of glucagon that can be stored under the skin and deployed during an emergency — with no injections needed.

For people with Type 1 diabetes, developing hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, is an ever-present threat. When glucose levels become extremely low, it creates a life-threatening situation for which the standard treatment of care is injecting a hormone called glucagon.

As an emergency backup, for cases where patients may not realize that their blood sugar is dropping to dangerous levels, MIT engineers have designed an implantable reservoir that can remain under the skin and be triggered to release glucagon when blood sugar levels get too low.

This approach could also help in cases where hypoglycemia occurs during sleep, or for diabetic children who are unable to administer injections on their own.

“This is a small, emergency-event device that can be placed under the skin, where it is ready to act if the patient’s blood sugar drops too low,” says Daniel Anderson, a professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), and the senior author of the study. “Our goal was to build a device that is always ready to protect patients from low blood sugar. We think this can also help relieve the fear of hypoglycemia that many patients, and their parents, suffer from.”

The researchers showed that this device could also be used to deliver emergency doses of epinephrine, a drug that is used to treat heart attacks and can also prevent severe allergic reactions, including anaphylactic shock.

Siddharth Krishnan, a former MIT research scientist who is now an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

Emergency response

Most patients with type 1 diabetes use daily insulin injections to help their body absorb sugar and prevent their blood sugar levels from getting too high. However, if their blood sugar levels get too low, they develop hypoglycemia, which can lead to confusion and seizures, and may be fatal if it goes untreated.To combat hypoglycemia, some patients carry preloaded syringes of glucagon, a hormone that stimulates the liver to release glucose into the bloodstream. However, it isn’t always easy for people, especially children, to know when they are becoming hypoglycemic.

“Some patients can sense when they’re getting low blood sugar, and go eat something or give themselves glucagon,” Anderson says. “But some are unaware that they’re hypoglycemic, and they can just slip into confusion and coma. This is also a problem when patients sleep, as they are reliant on glucose sensor alarms to wake them when sugar drops dangerously low.”

To make it easier to counteract hypoglycemia, the MIT team set out to design an emergency device that could be triggered either by the person using it, or automatically by a sensor.

The device, which is about the size of a quarter, contains a small drug reservoir made of a 3D-printed polymer. The reservoir is sealed with a special material known as a shape-memory alloy, which can be programmed to change its shape when heated. In this case, the researcher used a nickel-titanium alloy that is programmed to curl from a flat slab into a U-shape when heated to 40 degrees Celsius.

Like many other protein or peptide drugs, glucagon tends to break down quickly, so the liquid form can’t be stored long-term in the body. Instead, the MIT team created a powdered version of the drug, which remains stable for much longer and stays in the reservoir until released.

Each device can carry either one or four doses of glucagon, and it also includes an antenna tuned to respond to a specific frequency in the radiofrequency range. That allows it to be remotely triggered to turn on a small electrical current, which is used to heat the shape-memory alloy. When the temperature reaches the 40-degree threshold, the slab bends into a U shape, releasing the contents of the reservoir.

Because the device can receive wireless signals, it could also be designed so that drug release is triggered by a glucose monitor when the wearer’s blood sugar drops below a certain level.

“One of the key features of this type of digital drug delivery system is that you can have it talk to sensors,” Krishnan says. “In this case, the continuous glucose-monitoring technology that a lot of patients use is something that would be easy for these types of devices to interface with.”

Reversing hypoglycemia

After implanting the device in diabetic mice, the researchers used it to trigger glucagon release as the animals’ blood sugar levels were dropping. Within less than 10 minutes of activating the drug release, blood sugar levels began to level off, allowing them to remain within the normal range and avert hypoglycemia.

The researchers also tested the device with a powdered version of epinephrine. They found that within 10 minutes of drug release, epinephrine levels in the bloodstream became elevated and heart rate increased.

In this study, the researchers kept the devices implanted for up to four weeks, but they now plan to see if they can extend that time up to at least a year.

“The idea is you would have enough doses that can provide this therapeutic rescue event over a significant period of time. We don’t know exactly what that is — maybe a year, maybe a few years, and we’re currently working on establishing what the optimal lifetime is. But then after that, it would need to be replaced,” Krishnan says.

Typically, when a medical device is implanted in the body, scar tissue develops around the device, which can interfere with its function. However, in this study, the researchers showed that even after fibrotic tissue formed around the implant, they were able to successfully trigger the drug release.

The researchers are now planning for additional animal studies and hope to begin testing the device in clinical trials within the next three years.

“It’s really exciting to see our team accomplish this, which I hope will someday help diabetic patients and could more broadly provide a new paradigm for delivering any emergency medicine,” says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and an author of the paper.

Other authors of the paper include Laura O’Keeffe, Arnab Rudra, Derin Gumustop, Nima Khatib, Claudia Liu, Jiawei Yang, Athena Wang, Matthew Bochenek, Yen-Chun Lu, Suman Bose, and Kaelan Reed.

The research was funded by the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, the National Institutes of Health, a JDRF postdoctoral fellowship, and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

source: MIT News