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EPR for agricultural plastics : recommendations for setting up an effective national collection scheme
AUTHOR : Liam Moloney, CEO, IFFPG (Irish Farm Film Producers’ Group)
The Irish Farm Film Producers’ Group (IFFPG) has been working with farmers in Ireland for some twenty years. Collection rates regularly reach 90% and 95% of what is collected is recycled. With a very high participation rate by farmers in the Irish scheme, the final challenge is to find recycling outlets for all the products collected at a reasonable price. Successful collection schemes are based on fundamental principles on which new schemes can build. Liam Moloney, CEO of IFFPG, gives us some recommendations and advice on how to set up a successful scheme.
Why an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) approach?
There are over 10 million farmers in Europe, and the average farm size is small, around 16 hectares on average. These farms are located in rural areas and sometimes in very inaccessible remote areas, such as mountainous or coastal regions. This makes it very difficult to provide farmers with a comprehensive and reliable waste collection service.
In addition, most farmers produce very small volumes of end-of-life plastics, just a few hundred kilograms a year and, to complicate matters even further, different types of waste and plastics: different films, including stretch film, but also packaging for fertilisers and chemicals. Farmers have to sort and collect these materials separately for recycling, which poses a problem in terms of contamination from chemicals or soilage (minerals, water, organic matter), which can be in excess of 50%! These end-of-life products have no value, with a few exceptions. This is why the private sector, the market, is unable to provide a comprehensive national collection service.
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