Plasticity to host online event in late November

The organizer of Plasticity plastic recycling and sustainability events has announced there will be a 90-minute Plasticity “Directors Cut” online event on Wednesday, Nov. 25.

The event, which has “Sea of Solutions” as its theme, will be broadcast online at 1 p.m. China time Nov. 25, which is noon in Thailand and some other parts of Southeast Asia and 10:30 a.m. in India.

Doug Woodring of Plasticity and the Hong Kong-based Ocean Recovery Alliance says the event will be “curated and presented by Plasticity” and hosted online in cooperation with the Nairobi, Kenya-based United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). It is the 14th Plasticity event and the first virtual one.

Woodring says the current environment for plastics recycling includes “new economics in the plastic circular economy, starting with the corporate commitments that create demand [and] recognize the market failures of supply, to forecast pricing and other market dynamics in the coming five years.”

He says an analysis using data from companies including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, Unilever, Danone and others shows “recycled plastic has become a market category in its own right,” resulting in the decoupling of recycled-content plastic prices from virgin resins.

Writes Woodring in a recent online article, “When the price of crude oil plunged to minus $37.63 a barrel earlier this year, it was viewed as a blow to the fledgling recycled plastics market. After all, when used correctly, virgin and recycled plastics deliver the same quality standard, so why should one pay more?

"Surely, this conventional wisdom remains sound: the use of recycled plastic is tied to the price of crude oil. However, conventional wisdom can be anything but. Consider the introduction of the ‘horseless carriage’ [or] space travel as the sole domain of highly trained astronauts.

"Henry Ford’s cars and Richard Branson’s space travel upended the conventional wisdom by finding a fit between demand and supply. Similar market dynamics are playing out in the recycled plastics space, potentially upending the conventional wisdom that plastic, recycled or virgin is permanently tied to the price of oil.

"Spurred on by consumer sentiment, corporate commitments, anti-pollution regulation, access to funds and new business models demand for recycled plastic has moved from nice to have niche to the new norm – coming in as the No. 2 packaging trend for 2020. As yet, the supply channels for this pent-up demand are far from adequate, but the starter’s gun has fired, signaling recycled plastic has become a market category in its own right.”

These and other topics will be disused Nov. 25, Woodring says. Information on registering for the online event can be found on this web page.