System Interventions

System Intervention #1:

Reduce plastic consumption to avoid over 20% of projected plastic waste generation by 2040

An increased focus on reduction strategies is necessary to limit the growth of plastic consumption over the next 20 years. In a Business-As-Usual scenario, plastic consumption in Norway could grow from 289,000 tonnes in 2019 to 376,000 tonnes in 2040, increasing pressure on our waste management systems, climate and ecosystems, both in Norway and beyond. Limiting the growth of avoidable plastic consumption is feasible if it provides society with the most attractive alternative solution from environmental, economic, and social perspectives. Reduction offers net savings to society by cutting the need for waste management and provides the highest mitigation opportunity in GHG emissions compared to any other lever. But it requires consolidated action, mostly from consumer goods companies and retailers, to ensure that, (1) avoidable plastic is systematically eliminated at source and, (2) new delivery models (including reuse systems) are developed and deployed at scale.

To calculate the reduction potential in Norway, we applied the peer-reviewed framework developed in “Breaking the Plastic Wave”, which scores dozens of known solutions for each plastic application based on four dimensions: performance, technology, affordability and convenience. The full details of this assessment can be seen in the technical report. Our analysis found that up to 31,000 tonnes of plastic waste (8%) – mostly packaging – can be eliminated at source while 49,000 tonnes (13%) can be reduced through new delivery models – without reducing utility to consumers. Flexible packaging – especially carrier bags and films (both post-consumer and B2B) – are the applications with the largest reduction potential (48,000 tonnes), followed by rigid packaging (14,000 tonnes including mostly pots, tubs and trays) and beverage bottles (13,000 tonnes). On a per capita basis, this system intervention reflects a reduction from 65 kg (under Business-As-Usual) to 51 kg of plastic per person per year by 2040 (compared to 54 kg today). For more information on this analysis and the relevant assumptions, please consult the technical report.

Examples of applications with the highest potential for reduction are:

  • Use of concentrated capsules for household cleaners, soaps, or even toothpaste
  • Moving from liquid to solid cosmetics
  • Packing reusable water bottles and bags
  • Drinking off-premises coffee or tea from a reusable cup
  • Scaling up the use of soda and/or sparkling water dispensers
  • Trialing edible packaging alternatives for food and drinks
  • Ordering online shopping, groceries, or meals in reusable boxes and containers
  • Shopping from in-store displaying bulk dispensers and plastic-free aisles
  • Shifting from disposable to reusable diapers
  • Encouraging business-to-business development of closed loop and/or re-use systems for secondary and tertiary packaging (e.g. crates).

While this system intervention requires that consumers shift their behaviour, the role of consumer goods companies and governments is even more important.

  • Consumer goods companies and retailers have the most prominent role in ensuring that:

– They adopt regulatory or standard requirements for plastic packaging that focus on the elimination of avoidable packaging.

– They scale-up supply chain innovation, such as the use of seasonal food, local suppliers, digital trackers, and choice editing (reducing the need for packaging to differentiate products).

– Consumers are offered the choice to consume differently. R&D programmes and pilots must be implemented to identify which existing solutions could be culturally accepted in Norway and the impact of each one on a product-by-product basis.

  • The central government can also play a role by shifting the burden of the cost of waste management towards producers through different policies, such as legally binding extended producer responsibility (EPR), and legally binding taxes on single-use plastic and wasteto-energy incineration. New policies will need to meet the requirements set out in the relevant EU legislation.

System Intervention #2:

Substitute plastic wherever feasible and beneficial to prevent an additional 7% of plastic generation by 2040

In parallel to reduction, Norway should harvest the potential for the substitution of plastic wherever it can be undertaken at no cost to society or the environment. Material substitution is a complex topic that requires careful examination at the product level to understand performance, convenience and cost, as well as unintended consequences. In this report, only two material substitution strategies were considered: paper and compostable materials. These two materials were selected because they are the most prevalent for replacing single-use packaging. This system intervention refers only to substituting singleuse plastics with other single-use materials; using metal or glass as multi-use substitutes can be legitimate but is included under System Intervention #1. It is important to note that our analysis on substitution should not be considered predictions of change or recommendations, but indicative of the future scaling of existing materials assuming no unintended consequences. Therefore, a key enabling condition is for the feedstock for these two materials to be sustainably sourced (including sound land and water management) and recycling rates to remain high.

In a globalised system of food production and consumption, the GHG emission savings offered by lightweight plastic materials are important. However, if supply chains are shortened, transport is decarbonised, or reuse and recycling rates are high, other substitute materials – such as glass and metals – can perform well. Life cycle analysis on a product-by-product basis should remain the standard for science-based decision-making processes when it comes to substitution.

For our analysis, compostables are defined as materials capable of disintegrating into natural elements in a home or industrial composting environment within a specified number of weeks, leaving no toxicity in the soil according to credible international standards. Compostables are most relevant where food waste processing infrastructure exists or will be built, and for substituting thin plastic films and small formats. Substitution with compostable materials is most appropriate for products with low plastic recycling rates and high rates of food contamination, making coprocessing with organic waste a viable option. Given the specificity of the Norwegian context – such as high food-waste sorting at source, cold weather leading to low potential for home composting, and a heavy reliance on anaerobic digestion for food-waste processing – the potential of compostable materials has been adjusted to exclude target materials and applications that typically take longer to degrade (e.g. thicker products and poly(lactic acid)).

Our analysis found that up to 15,000 tonnes (mostly of packaging), can be substituted with paper and up to 10,000 tonnes with compostables. Non-food contact applications, and dry food applications where water barrier properties are not necessary, including postconsumer films, have one of the highest substitution potentials (10,000 tonnes), followed by rigid packaging (10,000 tonnes) mostly comprised of pots, tubs and trays, and B2B films and carrier bags (2,000 tonnes). For more information on this analysis, please see the technical report.

Examples of applications with the highest potential for reduction are:

  • Use of concentrated capsules for household cleaners, soaps, or even toothpaste
  • Moving from liquid to solid cosmetics
  • Packing reusable water bottles and bags
  • Drinking off-premises coffee or tea from a reusable cup
  • Scaling up the use of soda and/or sparkling water dispensers
  • Trialing edible packaging alternatives for food and drinks
  • Ordering online shopping, groceries, or meals in reusable boxes and containers
  • Shopping from in-store displaying bulk dispensers and plastic-free aisles
  • Shifting from disposable to reusable diapers
  • Encouraging business-to-business development of closed loop and/or re-use systems for secondary and tertiary packaging (e.g. crates).

While this system intervention requires that consumers shift their behaviour, the role of consumer goods companies and governments is even more important.

  • Consumer goods companies and retailers have the most prominent role in ensuring that:

– They adopt regulatory or standard requirements for plastic packaging that focus on the elimination of avoidable packaging.

– They scale-up supply chain innovation, such as the use of seasonal food, local suppliers, digital trackers, and choice editing (reducing the need for packaging to differentiate products).

– Consumers are offered the choice to consume differently. R&D programmes and pilots must be implemented to identify which existing solutions could be culturally accepted in Norway and the impact of each one on a product-by-product basis.

  • The central government can also play a role by shifting the burden of the cost of waste management towards producers through different policies, such as legally binding extended producer responsibility (EPR), and legally binding taxes on single-use plastic and wasteto-energy incineration. New policies will need to meet the requirements set out in the relevant EU legislation.

Overall, it is worth noting that the substitute materials in this category come at a higher cost (up to 2 times more when including production and packaging conversion). Ensuring the development of substitute materials at scale in Norway relies on several enabling conditions:

  • The central government supporting the development of research and innovation in the field of alternative materials for single-use plastic packaging and problematic materials or formats (see System Intervention #10).
  • The central government, as well as other EU governments:
    – Supporting the development of standards which clearly define acceptable composting materials according to locally available management system and providing clarity around the word “biodegradable”.

– Promoting certification schemes for the sustainable sourcing of biomass and the adoption of strict criteria by brands and producers to ensure that substitutes contain recycled content and are sourced responsibly.

– Implementing policies and voluntary commitments to accelerate the expansion of paper collection and recycling, increase recycled content in paper, reduce contamination, and scale separate organic waste treatment that can accept compostable packaging.

  • The financial sector recognising the space as financially viable with economic opportunities. In accordance with the Circular Economy Action Plan, the European Commission is currently assessing applications where using biodegradable and compostable plastics can be beneficial to the environment, and the criteria for their use. Further policy development in this area is expected.

System Intervention #3:

Implement ambitious design for recycling standards for all plastic products and packaging put on the market

Design for recycling interventions have multiple benefits, including increasing the share of plastic that is recyclable, increasing the value of recycled plastic, and reducing losses in the sorting and recycling process. Taken together, these can significantly boost recycling economics and support the scaling of the recycling industry.

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, design for recycling has the potential to raise US$120 per tonne of recycled plastic30, virtually doubling profitability across the value chain (which can be captured by material recovery facilities, recyclers or a combination of the two).

Switch from multimaterials to monomaterials

Multimaterial products often exist to meet the toughest packaging requirements but are not mechanically recycled due to poor economics. While there is currently no pathway for mechanical recycling for multimaterials in the EU today, our analysis shows that about 30% of multimaterials (especially multilayers packaging) can be redesigned in the next 20 years to allow monomaterial alternatives. Examples of this in practice are multimaterial food pouches that have switched to monomaterial polypropylene.

Redesign (or remove) dyes, plastic pigments, and additives

One of the biggest barriers currently preventing recyclers from creating recycled plastic of a quality that can compete with virgin output is the presence of dyes, pigments, and/or additives. Colour is typically used for marketing purposes, but it makes recycling extremely challenging. To create a circular loop between plastic and products, many more items need to be made from unpigmented plastic and new marketing approaches need to be developed, such as using recyclable inks and labels. Coca-Cola, for example, has shifted the Sprite bottle to a transparent colour to enhance its recyclability

Remove problematic polymers

There are currently thousands of different plastic types and multiple formats, which inhibits the quality guarantee of the recyclate. By eliminating hard-to recycle polymers that would otherwise contaminate the rest of the plastic waste stream (such as PVC) and reducing the number of polymers used, both the sorting and recycling of plastic will be improved. These changes will decrease the complexity of sorting (for both consumers and sorters) and simplify recycling processes, ultimately increasing recycling yields and reducing costs.

Improve labelling and design for source separation

As sorting at source is often considered the missing link, better labelling could help both the consumer and the sorter to place products into the correct recycling stream. Labelling should therefore conform to clear national or international standards that take the practical recyclability of different materials into account. The packaging industry should also ensure that “labelling for recycling” is intuitive, especially when multiple polymers are used, to maximise recycling efforts from consumers, pickers, and sorters, as well as from recyclers themselves.

For example, a box made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) with a lid made of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) should have each component labelled separately, as opposed to the current practice in which, for the sake of aesthetics, HDPE and LDPE are both mentioned on the bottom of the box. By improving labelling practices, the complexity of sorting and recycling processes will decrease, thereby increasing the share of waste collected for recycling, increasing recycling yields, and reducing costs during sorting and recycling.

Achieving this at scale in Norway depends on a few enabling conditions:

  • Policy interventions to accelerate the adoption of design for recycling measures. Examples include: fee modulated EPR schemes; design for recycling standards; recycling targets; minimum recycled content targets; taxes on the use of virgin plastic feedstock; regulatory mandates on certain pigments, polymers and additives; disclosure mandates; and the regulation of recycling labelling practices
  • Greater industry collaboration to accelerate this transition by developing new polymer and packaging designs in coordination with recycling and sorting technology companies and harmonising materials and packaging formats across companies. Increased investment in R&D (by both public and private players) can also boost design for recycling.
  • Voluntary commitments by producers and retailers to increase recyclability and integrate recycled content in plastic products.
  • Shifting consumer preferences to drive higher demand for recycled content and higher recyclability of plastic products.

Scaling the downstream: sorting and recycling capacity are the backbone of any national recycling strategy and ultimately ensure plastic waste is not sent straight to waste-to-energy incineration

System Intervention #4:

Create new markets for different types of recycled content to enable the full potential of sorting and recycling technologies

Stimulating market demand for recycled plastic is a critical factor to ensure a zero-waste circular plastic economy is achievable. At the moment, the demand for certain plastic recyclates fluctuates due to insufficient commitment to use post-consumer recycled content, but our analysis indicates that new markets with an annual turnover of NOK 1.4 billion could be created by 2040. While sorting and recycling infrastructure makes recycling technically feasible, greater and more reliable demand for recycled content will make recycling economically viable and de-risk investments. In 2019, the two material recovery facilities (MRFs) in Norway reported that the main limitation for increasing their output was insufficient demand for high quality recycled content, not technical limitations or feedstock supply challenges. While an increasing number of global brands have committed to using at least 25% recycled content in packaging through Ellen MacArthur’s Foundation Global Commitment, it is important to ensure an exponential domestic growth in demand for recycled content for all types of polymers.

Design for recycling (System Intervention #3) naturally increases demand for recycled content due to improved quality and stability, but it is important to continue incentivising this demand. This can be achieved in a number of ways:

  • Packaging converters can diversify their R&D portfolio to include as many recyclate types as possible and demonstrate that the incorporation of recycled content is technically feasible and economically viable.
  • Consumer goods companies (and potentially retailers) can commit to increasingly higher use of recycled content in their products to drive demand, and sign long-term purchasing agreements (similar to those that supported the growth of renewable energy) to derisk investment for recyclers.
  • The central government can set a national target for recycled content use in accordance with EU legislation and provide financial incentives for companies/products with a high share of recycled content, similar to the new practices in other European countries. The EU is currently working on developing mandatory requirements for recycled content in areas such as packaging, construction materials, and vehicles, that can provide a framework for such legislation at the national level in Norway.

System Intervention #5:

Increase sorting capacity 16-fold to over 220,000 tonnes to enable a zero-waste circular plastic strategy

By far the main bottleneck to achieve any recycling target in Norway is the lack of sorting infrastructure. Massively increasing sorting capacity must therefore be the cornerstone of any strategy to achieve a zero-waste circular plastic economy. Today, just 16,000 tonnes of plastic (6% of the plastic waste collected) is sorted and brought to the only two MRFs or central sorting plants in Norway, which only accept mixed waste. Of the 99,000 tonnes (34%) of plastic waste sorted at source by consumers, businesses or industries (including beverage bottles from the deposit scheme), most is exported. The majority (60%) of the plastic waste collected from the 85% of the population which has access to source sortation but do not separate their plastic waste is incinerated with energy recovery – a total of 170,000 tonnes a year.

Our analysis shows that the development of a domestic sorting infrastructure is the most impactful lever to enable a zero-waste circular plastic system as it is the most effective way to divert plastic waste from waste-to-energy incineration to recycling. Under the System Change Scenario, up to 220,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year would need to be sorted. This corresponds to a 16-fold increase compared to 2019 levels. While ambitious, we believe that this increase is feasible as it meets economic, technical, logistical, and climate constraints. About half of this, an estimated 110,000 tonnes, could come from plastic waste sorted at source by consumers, businesses, or industries (including beverage bottles from the deposit scheme) and only require fine sorting. An additional 111,000 tonnes would be collected as mixed waste, either from parts of the country that do not have access to sortation at source or as waste that is not properly sorted, and would require both rough and fine sorting and thus different facilities.

Sorting at source is more efficient in theory as it eliminates a sorting step, but, source separation rates have been increasing very slowly, if at all.31 While source separation from business will be regulated in the near future and therefore is expected to increase, achieving significantly higher rates of source separation from consumers is unlikely. As such, our System Change Scenario assumes only a moderate increase in source sortation (from 34% in 2019 to 40% in 2040), mostly driven by businesses. It is also important to consider that an inefficient source sortation system may lead to an inefficient hauling system and therefore a potentially higher cost burden. It also requires different types of MRF able to sort mixed waste and sorted waste. In addition, it is the prerogative of municipalities to decide waste management practices, potentially making it complex to make nationwide changes without top-down regulation. In a report recently published by Mepex, Norner, and Handelens Miljofond29, a switch to mixed waste collection is recommended, with the goal to centralise and harmonise sorting practices nationwide while offering reduced collection cost.

System Intervention #6:

Scaling up mechanical recycling
capacity by 10 times to over 100,000 tonnes to ensure resilience and traceability

Increasing Norway’s mechanical recycling capacity will not necessarily lead to net economic, social or environmental benefits to the system. In fact, we assume that plastic that is not recycled in Norway is likely to find a recycling market overseas. However, our analysis shows the potential to increase the recycling capacity in Norway by up to 104,000 tonnes per year by 2040, and this development would provide with greater resilience and traceability.

In an environment where increasing regulatory pressure is pushing national governments around Europe to increase their recycling rates, the recycling industry will require significant scaling over the next years to be able to absorb additional supplies. Given the historically low profitability of mechanical recycling, these developments will probably not mobilise sufficient funding quickly enough, exposing Europe to the risk of a highly competitive recycling market. Building a domestic recycling industry would help Norway to mitigate this risk and create intrinsic resilience to ensure its recycling targets are met (and potentially increased). Technological limitations might exacerbate pressures for certain applications, especially when it comes to food grade recycling which is notoriously hard to achieve, particularly when it comes to post-consumer waste. But low hanging fruits exist, and the presence of a best-in-class deposit system for beverage bottles in Norway provides a great starting point.

Additionally, increasing domestic processing capacity will make traceability easier and reduce the risk of Norwegian waste being exposed to mismanaged, un-sound recycling practices abroad. The creation of a local recycling industry could also foster stronger collaboration between local players and result in higher levels of recycled plastic content being used in Norway.

However, the development of recycling capacity requires scale, which for some applications may require collaboration with neighbouring countries. As such, the creation of a recycling industry could be explored by Nordic countries as a joint strategy to efficiently secure their recycling commitments.

This system intervention will need the right enabling conditions to encourage private waste management companies to invest in Norway, for example:

  • The national government needs to ensure more economic recycling to attract private sector investment. This could be achieved through benefit schemes for recycling plants; financial incentives for the use of recycled content and/or disincentives for the use of virgin materials; financial disincentives for plastic to be sent to waste-to-energy incineration (e.g. a waste-to-energy incineration tax or carbon tax); and ensuring that EPR fees contribute fairly to recycling operational expenditures.
  • Industry and the financial sector need to map out the waste system to identify recycling stream opportunities and invest in missing technologies locally

The successful implementation of this system intervention requires the implementation of System intervention #5 – increase sorting capacity.

System Intervention #7:

Invest in sorting and recycling innovation to burst through technological ceilings and unlock higher recycling rates

Current technologies are among the key limiting factors to increasing recycling rates above 50%. Specifically, the significant loss rates in the process (estimated at 35-55% depending on material and technology), limitations to feedstock tolerance (both in terms of polymer variety and contamination levels), and high processing costs all significantly limit the scale of recycling. Our analysis shows that any ambitious recycling target relies on technology improvements to push the boundaries of current manufacturing processes. Breaking the technological ceiling requires investing in and supporting innovations in both sorting and recycling processes, particularly those that improve the yields of sorting technologies (both rough and fine sorting) and the yields of recycling technologies (both mechanical recycling though washing and grinding and chemical conversion).

Promising innovations include using advanced spectroscopy, machine learning, digital markers for better traceability, advanced robots, and deep learning or artificial intelligence to better recognise polymers and products. In parallel, recyclers should invest in R&D to ensure constant improvements in their processes and decrease losses at each processing step.

Supporting this transition will require collaboration between all value chain actors from fast-moving consumer goods companies to waste management companies, from regulators to financial institutions, including:

  • Strong investment support through grants to research programmes and technology entrepreneurs in the field to stimulate innovation.
  • Private public partnerships to de-risk and accelerate the commercialisation and transfer of new technologies.
  • Close collaboration with neighbouring European countries to leverage existing programmes and innovations, potentially through the creation of joint initiatives.

System Intervention #8:

Develop plastic-to-plastic chemical conversion locally to unlock recycling opportunities for materials that cannot be recycled mechanically and provide feedstock for food grade applications

Chemical conversion refers to any process which breaks down plastic into its chemical constituents (as opposed to mechanical recycling which does not alter the chemical structure of plastic during processing). Our analysis indicates the viable potential to build up a chemical conversion industry in Norway focused on naphtha production for plastic-to-plastic. Such an industry could emerge by 2025 and potentially process up to 36,000 tonnes of plastic raw material input by 2040, producing 22,000 tonnes of feedstock for the plastic industry. Alternatively, Norway could collaborate with existing chemical conversion technology providers in neighbouring countries to support the development of these technologies.

Our analysis shows an economic opportunity for chemical conversion given its technically feasibility and economic potential, particularly for recycling food-contaminated products and in providing virgin-quality feedstock. Chemical conversion is synergetic, not competitive, with mechanical recycling as they use different feedstock. However, chemical conversion has significant downsides, including high energy consumption (impacting its overall life cycle analysis profile) and unproven product yields for different feedstock types and conditions. For these reasons, chemical conversion should not be treated as a “silver bullet” and should be scaled very cautiously. Mechanical recycling should be prioritised over chemical conversion as it has better economic and environmental impacts and is a more mature technology. However, there is a role for chemical conversion in a zero-waste circular plastic industry due to its potential to raise the technical recycling ceiling, especially with regards to food-grade plastic, and avoid the technical limitations of mechanical recycling due to inherent degradation process after several loops.

Overall, developing chemical conversion technologies would position Norway at the forefront of innovation. Conditions that could support this development include:

  • Increasing financial flows toward mid- to industrial-scale pilots to de-risk the technology and create proof of concept.
  • Ensuring the development of mass balance certification mechanism to verify claims of recycled content use given the complex chemical process.
  • Reaching a sufficient scale to penetrate the naphtha market, which requires very large volumes to guarantee a steady supply of crackers. This system intervention refers strictly to plastic-to-plastic chemical conversion. In our analysis, plastic-to-fuel chemical conversion is considered “disposal” not “recycling” as it merely increases the use of the material by one “loop” before it is burned as fuel.

System Intervention #9:

Control the fate of plastic waste exported outside Norway to achieve a near-zero plastic pollution footprint.

While developing a plastic recycling trade is important to ensure that the use of recycled content becomes mainstream, the exports of plastic scraps both within and outside of the EU needs to be closely monitored. The Basel Convention, including the amendment signed in May 2019 that entered into force in 2021, classifies plastic as a hazardous waste when contaminated with other materials and not destined to be recycled in an environmentally sound manner, can be used as the basis of regulation in Norway. This will further reduce the risk of Norwegian plastic waste ending up in landfills in the EU or being mismanaged and leaked to the environment in the Global South.

System Intervention #10:

Create an innovation fund to encourage, support and enhance innovation across the plastic value system

Taken together, the nine system interventions described above can have a massive impact on the Norwegian plastic system. And yet, achieving the vision of a zero-waste circular plastic economy in Norway will require technological advances, new business models, significant spending, and – most crucially – accelerated upstream innovation. This massive innovation scale-up requires a focused and well-funded R&D agenda, including moon-shot ambitions.

Innovation can unleash the System Change Scenario by making solutions more affordable, more scalable, and more convenient for consumers, while further reducing environmental and health impacts. The key areas that urgently require innovation include packaging-free alternatives, improved barrier properties for monomaterials or new materials that are bio-benign, design for recycling solutions for multimaterials, advanced/automated sorting (including digital watermarks), improved process efficiency and feedstock tolerance for mechanical recycling, and improved yields/lower energy requirements for chemical recycling.

These advancements are unlikely to materialise without a significant, plastic-dedicated innovation fund(s) to encourage, support and enhance innovation – in Norway and beyond. This fund can channel investors towards the “valley of death” stage (the gap between developing innovations and their commercial application in the marketplace) by helping to rapidly transfer technologies out of labs and universities to achieve early commercialisation/implementation. This can be funded through philanthropy, impact investing, government grants, patient capital, non-diluted financing (e.g. grant and impact investing), and blended finance.

Raising ambitions: Even the System Change Scenario is not enough to create a decarbonised, Paris-aligned plastic system by mid-century

The System Change Scenario proposes a pathway to a circular plastic economy in Norway. But, while it reduces GHG emission by 25% by 2040 through dematerialisation and shifts from virgin to recycled content, this strategy is far from being aligned with the Paris Agreement, which Norway is a signatory of.

Achieving the full decarbonisation of the Norwegian plastic system requires pulling levers well beyond the scope of our analysis, such as decarbonising Norway’s electrical grid, decarbonising production and end of life processes through electrification and/or a shift to hydrogen, electrifying transportation, shifting to bio-based feedstocks, carbon capture and storage for flue gas, and more.

The Energy Transition Commission (ETC) estimates that the plastic sector can achieve up to 56% emission reductions by 2050 globally, and probably even more in developed economies such as Norway. According to the ETC, while energy efficiency can provide a moderate contribution, the decarbonisation of production processes is likely to contribute the majority of this emissions abatement through zero-carbon energy sources for high heat production (e.g. hydrogen, direct electrification, or biomass). The price of renewable energy and the technical feasibility of carbon capture storage technology are also going to be important factors in determining this pathway.

Decoupling the plastic industry from fossil-based feedstock is one of the key strategies, but requires ambitious target settings which are yet to be developed.

There are three major types of feedstock for the plastic industry: (1) fossil-based feedstock (commonly referred to as virgin plastic); (2) bio-based feedstock; and (3) recycled based feedstock, which can be derived from mechanical recycling or chemical conversion.

As of today, it is estimated that about 3% of the feedstock in Norway comes from bio-based sources32 and 5-10% comes from recycled content33. That means the vast majority of plastic (87-92%) is derived from fossil-based, virgin feedstock.

In our analysis, we have decoupled recycling rates from the use of recycled content in Norway because recycled content could have been recycled abroad and plastic recycled in Norway can be used abroad.

In practice, this means that, while 41,000 tonnes of recyclates produced from Norwegian waste through closed loop recycling are available as recycled content, we estimate that only 15,000 – 30,000 tonnes are actually used as recycled content in Norway. The net difference can be attributed to activities overseas.

Exhibit 14 shows different possible feedstock pathways for the System Change Scenario. These pathways have been generated based on realistic targets but are not actual projections. Instead, they should be viewed as a sensitivity analysis or a nuanced view of feedstock under different future scenarios. It presents four future feedstock worlds (not to be confused with the scenarios analysed in Chapter 2):

EXHIBIT 14

Feedstock pathways for the System Change Scenario and associated GHG emissions by 2040

VIRGIN PLASTIC COULD REPRESENT ONLY 30% OF THE FEEDSTOCK IN A CIRCULAR SYSTEM BY 2040

  • The “baseline” feedstock pathway assumes that biobased feedstock and recycled-content increase to 10% and 25%, respectively, by 2040 (up from 3% and 5-10% today).
  • The “bio-based world” feedstock pathway assumes that bio-based content will increase to 20% while recycled content increases to 25%.
  • The “recycling world” feedstock pathway assumes that recycled content increases to 50% (40% from mechanical closed loop recycling and 10% from plastic-to-plastic chemical conversion) while bio-based content increases to 10%.
  • The “new feedstock world” feedstock pathway – the most ambitious of all – assumes that recycled content increases to 50% and bio-based bio-based content increases to 20%.
  • All six scenarios analysed in Chapter 2, including the System Change Scenario, assume the “baseline” feedstock pathways; they could all have a considerably greater reduction in GHG emissions if more ambitious changes to feedstock were made.
  • While the System Change Scenario allows a reduction of GHG of 26% by 2040 (from 2 million tonnes of CO2eq by 2040 under Business-As-Usual to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2eq under the System Change Scenario), a deep change in feedstock to restrict virgin plastic to only 30% of the feedstock mix could deliver an additional 15% reduction (or 37% total reduction from Business-As-Usual), bringing the total GHG emissions from Norway’s plastic industry down to 1.27 million tonnes of CO2eq by 2040. This analysis highlights the need for Norway to track and scale the use of bio-based and recycled content and integrate it into its national plan to support efforts across emissions mitigation, climate action, and advance a zero-waste circular plastic economy. The reduction of the use of virgin material in the feedstock mix is an important target for any Paris Agreement-aligned strategy.