We were honoured to welcome everyone during the closing event on 8 December 2022 in Ghent. Even though the regions involved continued their efforts to accomplish a higher recycling rate of post consumer non-household plastic waste in urban environments - the so-called 'lost plastics'- the time had come to share some results with the world. During the event there was also a small exhibition of the products designed to showcase the possibilities of recycled plastics.

The closing event showcased an insight in the topics we have been working on since 2019. Partners from the four regions, The Hague, Douai, Ghent and Southend-on-Sea, presented their efforts and outputs.
As the table of content of the slide deck shows, we started with research on behaviour, burdens and opportunities, successful product cases using recycled plastics and logistic aspect. After that we conducted test collections in all regions, including analyses of the waste streams. With this knowledge we reached out to stakeholders in order to look to the future: how can we cooperate to create regional urban platforms, design new products and build business cases for products and/or a local PlastiCity hub.

Across all four regions involved in the project, our last assignment was to develop a handbook. This handbook offers guidelines for local or regional governmental organisations to establish a community of stakeholders for developing new value chains and business cases for post consumer non household plastic waste in urban environments.

At the end of the closing event we asked representatives of the four regions to look back on the project’s accomplishments and on future actions following the PlastiCity.

Looking back, they are grateful for the opportunity to work together across land and sea borders, and to exchange knowledge, expertise and lessons learned. An added bonus was the ability to build a narrative within the local communities with local entrepreneurs, schools, etc. and gain insight into the massive volumes and the composition of the waste stream created by these 'lost plastics Looking forward, the challenges to turn these massive volumes of ‘lost plastics’ available in the urban contexts into valuable raw materials is a responsibility of all stakeholders involved. Building a plastic hub together with local entrepreneurs is one way to create involvement, change and to create awareness and believe, preferably with support of local and EU authorities. Changes in local and national legislation can also be useful, if all companies, big and small are obliged to separate all plastic from other waste streams, a massive amount of plastics becomes available for recycling. This, in turn creates new opportunities to set up new projects and form collaborations, based on the knowledge that has been gathered. For all regions the issue of ‘lost plastics’ will be one road map within a more global roadmap towards a more circular economy. We hope this will become business as usual within the nearest possible future. It's a change of perception, as we've had to do in the past with digitalization for example. Therefore, we need to keep on pushing the boundaries for non-household waste.

Slide deck and video recording.

We invite you to have a closer look at the outputs presented on our closing event.

If you are specifically interested in one topic, both in the slide deck and video we added a table of contents that helps you to go directly to any of the topics presented.

You can either take a look at the slide deck.

Click on the table of content.

Or go to the PlastiCity Youtube channel for a video recording of the closing event.

 
Click on picture on the right.