“It is strange that it takes a war to pull our industry out of the doldrums.”
Marcel Alberts would not actually participate in the Plastics Recycling Show Europe (PRSE) in the Amsterdam RAI with his recycling company Healix. In September he had to tell his staff that his company could not survive in the Netherlands and would probably leave Limburg for a low-wage country. But now things are unexpectedly better. “A month and a half ago we thought: we really have to be at the fair. And this was literally the last stand they had left.”
Now Alberts is at the fair between glass jars full of blue plastic granules. Healix makes these granules from old fishing nets and big bags (large plastic bags). With staff who were already partly assigned to other companies, but were rehired in recent months. Has his company gone right past the abyss? “Yes,” Alberts smiles. “But what did that proverb say again? The most beautiful flowers grow along the abyss.”
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Were we naive, asks the umpteenth recycler who has to leave
“The production lines are doing their job, but the market is not,” said Ton Emans, chairman of Plastic Recyclers Europe, in his opening speech on Tuesday morning. At the tenth edition of the annual PRSE, the largest recycling fair in the world with more than five hundred exhibitors, he reflects extensively on the dramatic year that has passed. In 2025, sixty installations in Europe were closed, and 460 kilotons (460 million kilos) of recycling capacity were lost. This was in addition to the 400 kilotons that had already disappeared in the two years before.
The Dutch recycling sector also lost at least a third of its capacity. Twelve recyclers went bankrupt. Last March, Repeats Northern Europe from Zutphen, the Netherlands’ largest recycler of agricultural film, collapsed.
The petrochemical industry has it much easier: extracting oil and gas from the ground and turning it into plastic
“We have to compete with virgin” sighs Emans in the opening speech. That ‘virgin’ plastic is made new in colossal factories in China, the Middle East and the United States, from oil and gas, and shipped to the Netherlands. “Recyclers have to buy, sort, wash and melt collected old household waste,” says Emans. “The petrochemical industry has it much easier: extracting oil and gas from the ground and turning it into plastic. Nature takes millions of years to make oil. And we recyclers try to compete with that.”
This unequal competition has worked out better for recyclers in recent months. The price of oil has risen sharply, and the price of virgin plastic has risen along with it. The Middle East is an important exporter of various types of plastic, for example for packaging and shampoo bottles. But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is now making that export more difficult.
“The buyers are coming back,” says Emans on stage. “Demand is increasing. What does that tell us?” According to him, this proves that recycling technology works and that there is nothing wrong with recycled plastic. Provided you change the circumstances. Because recycling machines do not run by themselves. “They run on orders.”
Pieces of green plastic at the Plastics Recycling Show Europe.
Photo Olivier Middendorp
Children’s buttocks
“This is fantastic,” Gerrit Klein Nagelvoort, CEO of Veolia Polymers in Vroomshoop, Overijssel. He holds up a gray spectacle reducer, intended for children’s bottoms in the toilet. His stand displays products made with his recycled plastic: vacuum cleaners, crates, coffee machines, paint pots, buckets. Underneath the children’s seats there is a rubbery recycled material developed by Veolia, so that the seats do not slip off the toilet. This morning a potential customer came forward wanting more of that rubber stuff.
“Golddiggers,” Klein Nagelvoort jokes about customers who now suddenly know where to find him. He has taken off his beige coat in the warm, busy RAI. Things are going “wonderfully beyond expectations,” he says. “And that is not because of a sudden wave of a sense of sustainability.”
He also notices that the price of new plastic has risen explosively. For polypropylene, which he recycles from household waste, the price of virgin material increased from about 80 cents per kilo to well above 2 euros. “And then companies think: maybe there is something to be gained from recycling. That assumption is correct, but we do not intend to supply to all parties at all costs. Our regular customers come first.”
Gerrit Klein Nagelvoor of Veolia Polymers with the glasses reducer made by his company.
Photo Olivier Middendorp
The years when oil prices were low and new plastic cheap have been tough for Veolia Polymers. There is still unsold stock in the parking lot. “These companies have not been able to find us over the past three years and we have been able to survive because of a group of loyal customers, including from the garden sector. They have paid more than what they had lost for virgin. We would like to talk to the new customers. But then there must be a long-term agreement. So that they do not vomit us again when everything calms down on the oil market.”
A zone has been designated in the RAI halls as: AI feature areato showcase the latest recycling innovations. Tiny robots (the size of a house cat) drive around there to suck up cans of cola and cartons of apple juice and drop them into the right waste bins. AI programs already help dozens of sorters to recognize different types of plastic and other potential raw materials in the waste stream.
Flamingo Pink
At the Veolia stand there are extensive color charts that are on par with those in the paint department of a hardware store. Plastic in colors such as Flamingo Pink, Deep Sky Blue, Apple Green and Pineapple Yellow. Klein Nagelvoort invested more than 3 million euros in a color separation machine in its factory, which uses a camera and 64 air pistols to shoot plastic chips into the correct color bin.
Long gone are the days when recyclers could only make dark gray plastic. Nowadays, thin films and heavily contaminated household waste can also be recycled. Customers turning away in recent years was not due to quality, but to price. For example, Klein Nagelvoort developed a specific color blue for a customer in 2022, but discontinued it because new plastic became cheaper than recycled due to the low oil price. Exactly those customers, he sees, are now coming back to him.
“We should no longer be at the mercy of the vagaries of oil prices,” says Klein Nagelvoort. “Plastic recycling is an industry in itself. It has nothing to do with oil.” In addition, producers should be made more responsible for their waste, he believes. “Then they put a nice ‘recyclable’ on their product for marketing purposes. But if I come to the same company with a nice recycled granule, they won’t be warm or cold about it.”
Recyclers have been asking for years for legislation that could decouple their activities from the volatile oil market. The resurrection of Limburg’s Healix proves that legislation makes a difference. Because things are improving, not only “because of our orange friend”, says Alberts, referring to Trump. “Later this year it will be banned to export plastic waste. As a result, many big bags will come onto the market that need to be recycled in Europe.” By quickly switching from fishing nets to big bags, Healix was able to survive.
In 2030, European legislation will come into effect requiring manufacturers to process an increasing percentage of recycled plastic in their products. This impending blending obligation makes the devastation in the recycling industry even more painful. It takes three to five years to build new facilities. Soon, the sector fears, a lack of recycling capacity will be another argument for postponing this legislation. In the Netherlands, rules that could have helped recyclers have been postponed before. For example, the previous government canceled an obligation to mix recycled plastic that should have come into effect in 2027. In Italy, the introduction of a plastic tax has already been postponed eight times.
If the energy crisis continues and customers continue to report, Veolia Polymers can think about new investments again, says Klein Nagelvoort. “These have not been achieved overnight. My biggest fear is that this will soon become the excuse not to have to switch to recycled plastic. That producers will say: ‘It is not possible, because there is too little recycled plastic.’ No! It was there, but you didn’t want it.”
A shredder from Weima Plastic Shredders at the Plastics Recycling Show Europe in Amsterdam.
Photo Olivier Middendorp