Arthur Schwesig, MGG Polymers, Austria, presented the company’s activity “urban mining” materials from end-of-life plastics. He presented examples of consumer products today produced using recycled plastics, recovered and re-compounded by MGG from waste plastics. The performance of sorting of the waste plastic stream is essential, and is a key part of MGG’s know-how: whilst a 10% error rate in recycling is adequate for downcycling, recycling for polymer use in technical applications requires at least 98% accuracy in sorting. This is a real challenge: for example, end-of-life automotive plastics must be separated into over 200 distinct streams. MGG now offers a PC-ABS polymers based on post-consumer recovered plastics: UL94-V0 (3 mm), a full range of colours, bromine-free and recyclable, with the “Circularity Approved” label (developed with Fraunhofer). Mr Schwesig underlined the difficult problem of dealing with post-consumer plastics containing brominated flame retardants, for which no recycling routes are available in Europe.