Quantifying recycling quality in Europe. Specific study within a Framework Contract to support to the European Environment Agency’s activities on circular economy and industrial transformation for emerging waste streams – challenges and opportunities

The purpose of the project “Quantifying recycling quality in Europe”, launched by the European Environment Agency (EEA), is to develop a suitable and readily operational model to assess the quality of recycling for a given material, currently and in the recent past, and to test its application on a set of representative waste material fractions in the European Union (EU). The following waste material fractions have been selected for the analysis:

• PET packaging
• Municipal biowaste
• Post-consumer textiles

This model will then potentially be used to quantify the recycling quality for other waste material fractions and for the years to come, ultimately allowing the EEA to monitor the development of the recycling systems in the EU. The model can help identify hotspots in recycling chains, i.e., when or what in the process negatively impacts the quality of the processes and the outputs. The model can also help decision-makers at the EU and Member-state levels to tailor more effective measures to improve circularity for each material.