According to the Climate and Resilience law, non-recyclable polystyrene packaging must be banned from January 1, 2025. But by the government’s own admission, manufacturers will not be able to apply the law. “Le Monde” and franceinfo had access to a report which should have alerted the authorities in 2021.
“The ambitions of the law were too ambitious. We are at an impasse. Manufacturers will not be ready in time“. Asked by The world and franceinfo, the Ministry of Ecological Transition no longer hides it. The provision of the Climate and Resilience Law of 2021, providing for the ban on non-recyclable polystyrene packaging (yogurt pots, dessert creams or even meat and fish trays), cannot be implemented as planned on January 1 2025.
This renunciation on the ecological transition front could, however, have been avoided, without a lobbying operation skilfully carried out by the agro-industry and plastics manufacturers, who used the well-known “3 D” method: “Deny, deceive, delay”, that is to say, in French: deny, deceive, delay. This strategy, used in particular for years by the giants of the tobacco industry, consists of ignoring or postponing urgently necessary changes. In this case the reduction of plastic waste, more precisely polystyrene waste. A material which represents more than a third of plastic packaging found in the environment, but to which manufacturers are very attached, for its technical qualities. Very light, easily breakable, polystyrene is ideal for producing, in particular, the 14 billion pots of yogurt purchased and thrown away each year in France.
Problem: today no recycling center in France knows how to process this waste. Those that are not burned or buried (less than 5%) are shipped to Spain and Germany, with no return to food contact possible. At best, yogurt pots are transformed into hangers or flower pots. However, when the law was voted on in 2021, manufacturers managed to convince senators and deputies, rather than opting for a firm ban on January 1, 2025, to condition this removal on the absence of a dedicated recycling sector. .
At the same time, these same industrialists, united within a consortium called PS25, are committed within the framework of a charter submitted to the government “to create a unique French sector for recycling polystyrene packaging with a return to food contact”. Among the signatories: Syndifrais, the professional union for fresh dairy products (Yoplait, Lactalis, Senoble, Rians), players in the plastic lobby (Plastics Europe, Polyvia, Elipso), but also Citéo, a company with a mission created by companies of the consumer goods and distribution sector to reduce the environmental impact of their packaging and paper. Main objective of the charter: recycle “100% of polystyrene packaging collected and sorted” on January 1, 2025, thanks to a “French sector” recycling, whose factories would be “operational from 2023”. In the absence of technical feasibility, manufacturers undertake to develop a “operational exit plan” polystyrene “towards recyclable or reusable alternative solutions”.
A few months later, in December 2021, a progress report was submitted to the Ministry of Ecological Transition. Unlike the PS 25 charter, it is not published on the ministry’s website. It was never made public, but The world and franceinfo were able to consult it. This document, lacking a bibliography, condenses into around fifty pages numerous unsourced, biased and incomplete allegations. We can read in particular that plastics have a better environmental record than their alternatives. Not a word about the models implemented in other countries, such as returnable glass jars in Germany, or the use of less problematic plastics such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain or in Portugal. Studies unfavorable to polystyrene are never discussed. Finally, the report forecasts an upward trend in the supply of polystyrene material, in contradiction with the objectives of the AGEC law of 2020 on the reduction of plastics.
However, it is on the basis of this document, and with the consent of the government, that manufacturers have chosen not to give up polystyrene, favoring the route of chemical recycling, about which we can read in the report that the technologies “develop very quickly”even if to achieve this the signatories of the report request “support from public authorities”. Three “operational projects” French are highlighted: that of a chemical recycling plant, carried by the Michelin group, another by the company Inéos in Wingles in Pas-de-Calais, finally the third project carried by TotalEnergies which plans to integrate polystyrene to its chemical recycling unit on the Grandpuits site in Seine-et-Marne.
Concerning Michelin, the report specifies that the waste collected will be sent for recycling in a factory “based in France”allowing to “treat term between 15 000 and 20 000 tonnes of polystyrene each year.
While the report provided for regular monitoring of the progress of the projects in question, all have to date been abandoned, as confirmed to us by the government, which defends itself: “When the report came out in 2021, the context was different. With manufacturers like Michelin we thought there were serious players, but it didn’t work because of unexpected technical pitfalls. The problem is that we realized this too late. An inventory will have to be made in order to know the impasses, the reasons for these difficulties and to better understand why there are differences in situations.
“It is unacceptablereacts Charlotte Soulary from Zero Waste France (ZWF), an NGO which calls for an ambitious policy to reduce plastic waste. This report revealed by The world and franceinfo should have alerted the government to the impasse in recycling polystyrene”. The association calls for a parliamentary commission of inquiry after the elections to understand what happened, and denounces “a real waste of public money even though a strong public policy in favor of the reuse of packaging is sorely lacking”. Indeed, at the beginning of 2022, the Ministries of Ecological Transition and Industry launched a call for projects on chemical recycling, with 300 million euros in public funding. Asked about the use of these funds, Ademe, in charge of the call for tenders, did not wish to answer us.
For its part, the Citeo organization explains that it still selected two industrial projects located, not in France as planned in the report, but in Spain, in Valencia, for mechanical recycling, and in Belgium, in Antwerp, where a factory chemical recycling “will enter service before the end of the year” in Belgium. Ultimately, these two factories together will be able to handle 10,000 tonnes of polystyrene for recycling, 20% of which will be processed in Spain. Very far from the 105,000 tonnes placed on the market each year. But Citéo still asserts that “the charter’s objective of recycling 100% of collected and sorted waste will indeed be achieved on time”while admitting not being able to quantify the quantity of polystyrene waste collected today in France each year.
It remains to be seen what will happen on January 1, 2025. Asked by a senator during a question session with the government on June 4, Dominique Faure, the minister responsible for local authorities and rurality, indicated that it would be “reasonable” to postpone the ban on polystyrene packaging to align with the new European regulation which provides for all packaging to be recyclable in 2030. The Ministry of Ecological Transition now assures that it will be up to the future government to decide.