Assessment of circular economy indicators in a multi-criteria approach along the plastic packaging value chain

The awareness on raw material scarcity and environmental issues has globally stimulated interest into the re-design of products, processes or services, maximizing prevention, reuse and recycling rates. Within this context, plastic represents a key material. In particular, plastic packaging is a priority issue, accounting for the 40% of the European converters demand and about 60% of post-consumer plastic waste. Nowadays, less than 30% of collected plastic waste is recycled, while landfilling and incineration rates of plastic waste remain high, approximately 27% and 41% respectively. The EU Commission is currently hardly working on this issue: the recent EU Plastic Strategy sets very ambitious goals for plastics sustainability. This background topic is the key point of the master thesis. The study starts with mapping the best practices on plastic recycling and prevention, following the entire plastic packaging value chain. Adopting a multi-criteria perspective, legislative, economic and technical, technological and environmental framework of good practices and criticalities is outlined, in order to assess the current state of innovation on circular economy for plastics. The overview on levers and barriers for plastic circularity allows to design a new set of circular economy indicators suitable to be applied on plastic packaging sector. As good practices, eco-design principles are adopted in order to delineate an assessment tool able to identify plastic packaging sustainability and circularity. Moreover, the compliance with the regulatory framework and possible economic advantages are verified. Therefore, the final goal of the study is to identify practical suggestions which can be converted into a set of indicators for measuring plastic packaging circularity, delineating criticalities and possible improvements for boosting the sustainable transition of the entire sector