Her factories have never been so quiet. Normally the grinding mills and meter-high shredders hum and the washers rustle. Now the silence is deafening. “Very surreal. Suddenly it’s like a ghost factory.”
For eight years, Eline Stiphout (37) recycled plastic from PMD waste (PMD stands for plastic, metal and beverage cartons) with her company Stiphout Plastics in Montfort, Limburg. In two adjacent factories of 3,000 square meters, she washed, sorted and ground plastic so that it could be made into pipes, watering cans, buckets or flower pots. In 2023, chemical giant LyondellBasell bought half of the shares in the factory. But now the machines are at a standstill and her staff – 25 people in total – have gone home. The bankruptcy was declared by the court in Maastricht on Friday.
Long before this bankruptcy, it became clear that 2024 would be a disastrous year for the Dutch plastic recycling sector. In February, Umincorp went bankrupt, with factories in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, causing 120 people to lose their jobs. In the following months, the much smaller companies Ecocircle and TRH Emmen collapsed. The Eindhoven innovative company Ioniqa with approximately 60 employees, which was awarded a ‘national icon’ by the Ministry of Economic Affairs a few years earlier, went bankrupt in October. Ioniqa gave up its factory and half of its staff and was able to restart. The Vinylrecycling company from Lelystad collapsed in November and is still hoping for a restart.
Other Dutch plastic recyclers such as Limburg’s Healix have scaled down their production to avoid bankruptcy. The industry is particularly plagued by competition from cheap plastics made from oil and gas from mega-factories in Asia and the US. This makes new plastic more attractive and recyclate (recycled plastic) competes out of the market.
How are you?
“It goes back and forth a bit. It’s a feeling of disappointment and failure, but also the realization that I really did everything I could. And that someone else would not have succeeded in this situation either. I have lost a lot financially: I have not been able to get much out of the company, I always went for growth.
“A lot is happening at the same time now. A lot of people also approach me saying: this isn’t possible, is it? And: what do you need, can’t we just get on with it anyway?”
Can you get through with it?
“I have to let it sink in first. I find a restart exciting at the moment. It has always been a difficult industry: investments are high and margins are small. Even when things were difficult, I always believed that better times were coming. But now those better times are very far away, due to the low prices of new plastic. When I look around me, I see that everyone is having a hard time.”
When did you decide to start your business in plastic recycling?
“With my master’s degree strategic managementAt Tilburg University it was often about circularity and sustainability. That was the future. Immediately after my studies I started trading in plastic regrind: I bought it and sold it again. Later I bought bales of plastic, had them processed at a factory and sold them as regrind. With the money I earned from this, I bought my first shredder machine for 60,000 euros.”
Others were in the pub in their twenties, you bought a shredding machine.
“Yes, but I thought it was fantastic. I moved into an anti-squat home and, with my master’s degree in hand, was shredding plastic from CD covers for the recycling market seven days a week. It was fun, but one shredder won’t get you far. I knew I needed a real production line. The site owner where I rented space saw me working on that shredder every day and decided to invest in a first production line to process plastic into regrind. Once it was in place, we offered ourselves as a contracting company to various recyclers. Later we also expanded the line to process PMD waste for recycling. That was much tougher than expected. I spent hours at weekends sorting plastics and cleaning tanks until late at night. I really dedicated my life to it.”
What is involved in recycling plastic from Dutch waste?
“We washed it, separated it by density, and processed it into regrind. Many people do not realize how polluted our plastic waste is. How well that still needs to be washed. That there is always a residual fraction, and that it costs money to burn it. I needed a complete water purification. I had to reuse the water I used myself. We sometimes hurt ourselves in the Netherlands with stricter environmental requirements. German recyclers are allowed to discharge the water into the sewer, because food waste in people’s homes also enters the sewer through the tap. But in the Netherlands the water must be purified, filtered and reused. So we always have a disadvantage compared to our neighbors.”
What do you think about recycled plastic made from our waste competing with fossil plastic from huge Asian factories?
“It is strange that the collection and sorting of PMD waste is subsidized, but that recycling has to stand much more independently and pay for the waste it receives. We have to compete with cheap plastic from China and the rest of the world. We also face competition from recycled plastic from Asia. Which everyone knows is sometimes not actually recycled, but just new plastic that is sold that way. I am very concerned about the Dutch recycling industry. I fear we are really destroying it now. Working with plastic from PMD is very laborious, it is increasingly polluted, packaging is increasingly thinner. We face many technical challenges. While energy prices, personnel prices, waste costs – all those kinds of prices are rising.”
When did you realize that you weren’t going to make it?
“Only a few weeks ago. We worked partly as a contracting company for other companies and I also had great hope that I could enter the market myself to recycle PMD to increase margins. Producer organization Verpact is responsible for the distribution of PMD waste in the Netherlands. It turned out that I was allowed to process 2,000 tons of PMD waste for them, while I had calculated that I would need approximately 6,000 tons to keep us afloat in this difficult market. For the processing of PMD waste, I also compete with German recyclers, where they have more economies of scale.”
What needs to be done to help the Dutch recycling industry?
“There should absolutely be an import tax on fossil plastic. And a European mixing obligation, which forces plastic processors to use partly recycled plastic. This is planned for 2030, but that will be far too late for the Dutch plastic industry.”
You have two six-year-old daughters. What do you say to them?
“I still want to protect my daughters. I would prefer that they continue to think that recycling is completely normal. We used to say: what do we do with plastic? “Recycle!” they would shout. And who recycles it? “Mom!” My daughters are still too young to understand a word like bankrupt, for them I am just retired for a while.”