We recycle more by law. But recycling no longer pays.

Recycled plastic costs more than new plastic. So across Europe, recycling plants are shutting down — while the rules demand we use ever more of it. The European Commission calls it a sector in crisis.

What we know

Recycling plastic in Europe has become uneconomical. The reason is simple and paradoxical: recycled plastic costs more than virgin plastic, fresh from oil. According to the European Commission, the EU's recycling capacity — after years of growth — is expected to fall by roughly one million tonnes by the end of 2025, a volume equal to the entire recycling capacity of France. And of all the plastic produced in Europe, around 58 million tonnes a year, only about 13% is actually recycled into new plastic. The Commission blames high energy costs, the low and unpredictable price of virgin plastic tied to oil, and competition from cheap imports — often, it writes, virgin plastic passed off as recycled.

Why it matters

This is where the short circuit lies. European rules — the single-use plastics directive and the packaging regulation — impose rising quotas of recycled content: at least 25% in bottles from 2025. The goal is worthy: to create demand for recycled material. But in a market where virgin costs less, those obligations aren't enough to keep the plants alive, and they close one after another. The root cause isn't imported recycling itself, but the global overproduction of virgin plastic — largely of Asian petrochemical origin — which sets a price so low it drags everything else down with it. In Italy, according to the municipalities' association ANCI, the failure to collect sorted plastic costs towns an extra 350-400 million euros a year, with the risk it ends up on the waste tax.

What's still uncertain

Not all the numbers carry the same weight. The figure on lost recycling capacity comes from the European Commission and is solid. The market prices — recycled plastic costing hundreds of dollars a tonne more than virgin — come from industry reports and trade associations, which have an interest in portraying the crisis as severe: reliable as orders of magnitude, not as certified figures. And the Italian estimate of 350-400 million is a statement by ANCI, made while asking the government for subsidies: an order of magnitude, not an independent figure. The phenomenon is real and documented; the individual numbers should be read with this caution.