European Union moves forward with legislation to end single-use plastics

Single-use plastic items – supermarket bags, take-out food containers, disposable cutlery and plates, drinking straws, cotton buds and cigarette filters – make up a disproportionate share of the plastic waste found in the environment, particularly along coastlines and waterways. New EU legislation targets exactly these items, restricting or banning some of the most problematic single-use plastics outright, and introducing extended producer responsibility requirements for others.

The logic behind the legislation is straightforward: many of these products are used for minutes and then discarded, often have readily available reusable or non-plastic alternatives, and are disproportionately likely to end up as litter rather than in a recycling stream. By restricting them at the point of sale, the regulation aims to reduce the volume of this waste before it's ever generated – rather than relying solely on recycling to deal with it after the fact.

The solution, ECOPACK

For the plastic packaging that remains in circulation – including the many single-use items that don't fall under the new restrictions, as well as the broader universe of plastic packaging used across retail and food service – the challenge shifts to making sure as much of it as possible is actually recovered and recycled. This is where PICVISA's ECOPACK optical sorting system plays its part: using near-infrared sensors to identify and separate plastic packaging by polymer type and colour, ECOPACK helps recycling facilities recover higher volumes of plastic at greater purity, turning collected packaging waste into raw material that can genuinely be reused.

Legislation that reduces the volume of single-use plastics entering circulation, combined with sorting technology that maximises recovery of what remains, represents a two-pronged approach to tackling plastic waste – addressing both the supply of problematic items and the fate of the packaging that continues to be necessary.

See how ECOPACK sorts plastics by polymer type