CEFLEX: surge in collaboration boosts support for circular economy solutions for flexible packaging

CEFLEX, the collaborative initiative to increase the collection and recycling of flexible packaging formats below A4 in size, has grown dramatically since its official launch in 2017 at Interpack. The number of participating stakeholders has risen by 56% in the past seven months to reach 53, with companies and organisations from across the value chain.

CEFLEX’s ambitions are to make flexible packaging more relevant to the circular economy by advancing better system design solutions via collaboration of stakeholders representing the entire value chain, by 2025. “Thanks to the significant number and broad base of stakeholders, plus strong collaboration, progress is being made in all workstreams. The newly released Plastics Strategy further underlines the relevance of the work CEFLEX is doing.” explained Graham Houlder, the project coordinator.

The initiative is focused on consumer flexible packaging formats, which can be either single or multi-layer, use a variety of materials and which are not widely collected today for recycling in Europe. According to Thomas Greigeritsch of Constantia Flexibles, a leading global flexible packaging converter: “Flexible packaging is highly material efficient, only generating a limited amount of waste at its end of life but, if the waste is not collected it cannot be sorted and recycled.”

Read more here: CEFLEX PRESS RELEASE