Rob Ingram is the CEO of INEOS Olefins & Polymers Europe and a Plastics Europe Steering Board member. This is the text of the opening presentation he made to the European Commission in July 2025 as part of their Clean Industrial Dialogue on Circularity leading to the Circular Economy Act, hosted by:
- Teresa Ribera, Executive Vice-President for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition
- Stéphanie Sejourné, Executive Vice-President for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy
- Jessica Roswall, European Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Economy
Text of the speech
A functioning Circular Economy will be:
- key to ensuring all materials used responsibly & sustainably
- a major contributor to carbon emissions reductions
Building on SystemIQ report of 2022, Plastics Europe published its own Plastics Transition Roadmap. It identified the potential to drive circularity in the European plastics system to 65% by 2050, considering the potential for:
- re-use
- mechanical recycling
- chemical recycling
- biomass
- CCU plastics
This transition is a mammoth task, and requires action throughout the value-chain and across the whole plastics system:
- Producers
- Convertors
- Brand Owners
- Retailers
- Consumers
- Recyclers
- Waste Management
- NGOs
- Local Governments
- Member States
- EU
The transition cannot be delivered by one party alone, nor will it be achieved unless all parties play their part.
But to be successful, we need many pieces of the jigsaw to fit together.
First of all, we need a European industry
- Manufacturing in the EU today is uncompetitive versus its global competitors and is struggling to survive
- Every month there are new announcements of closures, major restructuring, or businesses being put up for sale
- Up until 2020, energy costs in Europe were comparable with those in the US.
- Today, they are 4 times those of the US
- In addition, European CO2 costs have more than tripled in the same period, whilst Free Allowance allocations have significantly reduced
- These are cost penalties that are specific to Europe, and some are totally self-inflicted
- To put European CO2 costs into a global perspective, in 2024 a total of $74B of CO2 taxes were raised worldwide, of which $63B were paid in Europe (with $47B coming from the EU-ETS)
- No wonder we struggle to compete
- This must be a priority and must be addressed urgently
- Unless we can retain and support our manufacturing base, there will be no Green Transition in Europe
- Production will move overseas. Employment will move overseas. New technologies will be developed and deployed overseas.
- And Europe will then rely increasingly on other regions of the world to supply us with the vital materials that we need, with these materials being shipped half-way round the world to meet our demand.
- This is the ultimate lose-lose scenario. Europe loses economically and the planet loses environmentally.
- Europe will miss-out on the opportunities of the Green Transition, when in fact we should be doing everything that we can to ensure that Europe benefits from these opportunities and is at the vanguard of the development of these new businesses.
Second, we need a supportive environment for investment
- Robust, reliable, and predictable permitting laws
- Access to grants, tax incentives, contracts for difference
- Fit-for-purpose legislation, and we need it now e.g. mass balance for chemical recycling of waste plastics – the goal should be to accelerate rapid growth of circular plastics, hence need regulations that are structured to enable existing assets and infrastructure to be used. In the current draft this is not obvious.
Third, we need regulations that are material and technology neutral
- Choose the right material for the right reason – blanket bans do not drive the right choices
- We need to be able to pursue all options if we are serious about driving a Circular Economy at scale, rather than preserving it as a niche activity
- Hence for end-of-life plastics we have to stimulate and support both mechanical recycling and chemical recycling
It is not a question of either/or, it has to be both/and
Fourth, we need a level playing field, across EU, and at the Borders
- Circular products imported into EU need to be held to the same standards as those for materials produced in Europe
- And this needs to be monitored and policed effectively
Finally, we need “demand-pull”, as well as “product-push”
- Currently customers and consumers will not, or cannot, pay the premium required for Circular plastics materials in any meaningful quantities
- To build this economy to scale, which enables costs to be diluted and prices to reduce, demand needs to be stimulated
There are several methods that should be considered:
- Binding recycled content targets
- Tax incentives for materials with recycled content
- Public procurement initiatives
- And if we want to support a European Circular Economy, consider a “Made in Europe for Europe” initiative.