Fostering Circular Plastic Packaging Design through Projects & Collaboration

In this workshop, you will develop future projects and joint actions focusing on the circular design of plastic packaging with key stakeholders from Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, and Sweden.

Innovative SMEs, knowledge institutions, public stakeholders, and other experts from different EU regions have come together to identify the most pressing challenges for a circular economy in the plastic and packaging industry. To address these challenges, they have developed new ideas and topics for joint action, which can contribute to increasing the circular design of plastic packaging. By participating in this workshop, you can be part of developing the projects and planning for joint action while also building new partnerships with actors from other regions.

Topics and ideas for joint action

Future projects can focus on capacity building and informed decision-making for packaging producers and can for example include actions to:

• Establish a joint platform/knowledge bank across countries to share best practices and principles from existing design guides.
• Share data to enable producers to understand trade-offs regarding functionality, reusability and recyclability when choosing alternative materials or designs.
• Test and implement principles from the design guides across the value chain. Share experience and data from the tests across regions to enable comparison.
• Demonstrate the benefits and challenges of LCA and other methodologies for impact analysis to provide input for the establishment of a unified system.
• Share knowledge about materials and material compositions that are difficult to reuse or recycle and should, therefore, be avoided in future production (including mixed plastics).

If you want to engage in joint actions and projects within some of these topics, this workshop is for you

Agenda

10:00 – 12:00

• Introduction
• Cross regional challenges for circular design of plastic packaging
• Hear which topics for future projects and actions that have been suggested by actors from Denmark, Belgium, Portugal and Sweden
• Exercise: Co-develop action plans for joint projects
• Financing of joint projects
• Introduction to the International Cleantech Network
• Next steps for engaging in future projects

The workshop is part of the project 3R Connect – Reduce, Reuse and Rethink. The project is funded by the European Union and facilitated by Clean, Flux50 and Smart Waste Portugal. The purpose of the project is to:

• Map and analyze regional capacities and potentials for circular economy
• Identify key value chains, technologies and innovation areas
• Develop plans for new cross-regional projects focusing on R&D, matchmaking, new value chains, capacity building, knowledge exchange, pilot & demonstration, public procurement etc.

To read more about the project, click here

You can also join this online platform to see the outcomes from previous workshops and engage with some of the actors, who were involved in the development of the suggested project topics.