From building tools to design. The new life of recycled polyethylene passes through the circular economy in a path in which sheets used for covering greenhouses become technical films for construction. It is precisely in this context that the first circular supply chain for the recovery of plastic waste (polyethylene) was born, which allows the sheets used for covering the vineyards and then discarded, to be entirely recovered and reinserted into the production cycle of particular films used in construction.
An ambitious project that aims to reduce the volume of polyethylene waste, in the name of environmental transition. The initiative, which marks a new course for the lightweight material and one of the most present in everyday life (it constitutes 30% of the total volume of world production of plastics), is carried out as part of the initiative “The new life of agricultural film” is the Ecopoliethylene consortium, based in Milan, which deals with the management of waste from polyethylene goods, together with the manufacturer Eiffel, the distributor Aniplast, and the operational support of Ecolight Servizi, Metaplas and Plastimontella.
The project, as the general manager of Ecopoliethylene, Giancarlo Dezio, points out, “stems from the dual need to start a specific collection of polyethylene goods used in agriculture and, at the same time, to identify an industrial outlet for secondary raw materials obtained from recovery processes”.
The initiative is strengthened by the fact that every year, according to the consortium’s data, “about 550 thousand tons of polyethylene goods are released for consumption with a waste production ratio close to one to one”. Not only that, “excluding packaging, about 70-80% of polyethylene goods waste is found in agriculture and urban areas”.
The field test of this project. From May 2021 to September, with the participation of several farms in Puglia and Basilicata. During the experiment, more than 34 tons of waste were collected (30 of which were suitable for recovery) deriving from sheets for covering the vineyards “produced by Eiffel and distributed, after further processing, by Aniplast”…
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