CSR news: Plastic waste

Welcome to the Newsletters Department!

As chairman of the committee of “our” Keurmerk I can open the new series of newsletters. When everything is in order, a newsletter is published every two weeks, written by someone who is involved in one way or another with the Keurmerk. Now there is normally so much dynamism in this area that writing about it should not be a problem. Anyone who follows the current affairs a bit knows that the largest part of the news consists of developments around the covid-19 virus, in normal or abnormal variant. And that has to do with the relevance of the news. Let's hope this will pass soon.

Now the CSR news. The Close News consists of the fact that my municipality started diftar on 1 January. For the outsiders: the waste is now delivered separately and the residual waste is paid for by the citizen per emptying. What is clear (and not just for Oldebroek) is that the bill will be a lot higher than in the period before this year! What has also become clear is the will of the Oldebroeker to offer his gray container as little as possible. The aim is to produce no more than 100 kg of residual waste per inhabitant. That has more than doubled in recent years, so that will require some creativity from the citizens. Looking in my container, I could only draw one conclusion: by far the most residual waste is plastic. I don't think it's much different with other (thrifty) Dutch people. The mountain that we as the Netherlands BV together make of plastic waste every year could well be higher than the highest mountain in the Veluwe.

Today the change.inc newsletter arrived. The Limburg company Itero has developed a technique that recycles the (almost) unusable plastic into naphtha, wax and oil. So no longer burn, but melt by burning without oxygen. Of course this costs energy, but the entire cyclical process saves 1000 kg of CO2 on 1000 kg of plastic. Itero now wants to process 27,000 kilos of waste plastic annually. Maybe my plastic waste is there too!