Increasing the share of recycled plastics in new products is a central aspect of the European Strategy for Plastics, adopted by the European Commission in 2018 as a part of the first Circular Economy Action Plan (2015). One of the main goals of the Strategy is to ?ensure that by 2025 10 million tonnes of recycled plastics find their way into new products on the EU market? , against less than 4 million tonnes in 2016. However, in 2016 only 8.4 million tonnes of plastics went to recycling facilities as input material. For this reason, the collection rate has to improve significantly and more collected material needs to reach recycling facilities instead of being incinerated or landfilled. Additionally, the demand for recycled plastics needs a boost, especially in added value applications where the current share is still zero or very low. Another precondition for the uptake of recycled plastics in added value products is trust. On the supply side, definitions, standards and traceability will help OEMs integrating recycled plastics into their business models. On the demand side, general acceptance of new materials will be crucial from all stakeholders, including manufacturers and the general public. The INCREACE project will tackle above mentioned issues through innovative and interdisciplinary solutions along the entire plastics recycling value chain embedded in a systemic framework. The project partners will develop new data-driven sorting solutions, combine complementary recycling technologies to increase the recycling yield and introduce new digital verification methods (blockchain) to create the required trust in the industry. The consortium will collaborate beyond organisational and sectoral boundaries to develop specific business-cases to proof the concept. The partners will provide targeted inputs into standardisation, policy making and foster active and inclusive engagement oof all relevant stakeholders as actors of the circular plastic transition.

Various activities address the WEEE value chain in order to reduce waste generation and enhance the sustainable resource management through use of recycled materials instead of their virgin counterparts. While the system for metals recycling is already well established, the rising volumes of waste plastics point to stalemates in the current plastics economy, which hamper its shift to a more circular model. Although there are individual efforts to improve the collection and recycling of WEEE plastics, the plastics value chain is still too fragmented and WEEE recycled plastics seem unattractive material for the end-user. To shift towards circular economy a systematic transformation is required, involving all actors in the value chain and encompassing the entire lifecycle of plastic materials. While substantially reducing the WEEE plastics generation and enhancing the use of recycled plastics in new applications, PolyCE will demonstrate the feasibility of circular plastics supply and value chain. In particular, PolyCE will elaborate harmonized set of technical requirements addressing the entire value chain and develop grade system for recycled plastics according to their material properties and final application suitability. Accordingly, PolyCE will strengthen the market for recycled plastics through an online platform integrating the different plastic grades. In parallel, the technical and economic feasibility as well as environmental benefits of using recycled plastics will be validated in several electronics demonstrators. In addition, PolyCE will provide Guidelines for designing new electronics products with recycled plastics. The project’s impact will be scaled up by involving target cities and their green public procurement initiatives; by EU-wide information and awareness raising campaigns. PolyCE will establish a feedback loop from the research activities, provide policy input regarding technical feasibilities and policy conflicts from technical perspective