Plastic Strategy

The EU adopted a European Strategy for Plastics in a Circular Economy¹ in January 2018, as part of the EU’s First Circular Economy Action Plan², which builds on existing measures to reduce plastic waste.

The Plastics Strategy aims to:

• Protect our environment and reduce marine litter, greenhouse gas emissions, and our dependence on imported fossil fuels;
• Transform the way plastic products are designed, produced, used and recycled in the EU;
• Drive innovation and investment by scaling up support for innovation, with an additional €100 million to develop smarter and more recyclable plastic materials and making recycling processes more efficient.

Building on this framework, the EU has introduced binding regulatory instruments targeting packaging and high-impact single-use products. A central delivery mechanism is the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive 94/62/EC (PPWD),³ which entered into force in February 2025. PPWR harmonises packaging rules across the EU, strengthening the internal market for secondary raw materials and reinforcing requirements on packaging design, reuse, recycling and waste collection. It also supports measures to reduce the use of lightweight plastic carrier bags through economic instruments such as charges, reduction targets, or bans. In parallel, the EU addresses the most harmful plastic items through the Single-Use Plastics Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/904⁴), adopted on 5 June 2019. This instrument targets the ten single-use plastic products most commonly found in marine litter and establishes restrictions, labelling obligations and extended producer responsibility requirements for specific packaging categories.

The EU is also advancing a dedicated mechanism to tackle microplastics. Under the Zero Pollution Action Plan⁵, the EU set a target to cut microplastics pollution by 30% by 2030. To deliver on this, the EU adopted restrictions on intentionally added microplastics under the EU REACH Regulation⁶. The new rules will prevent the release of about half a million tonnes of microplastics into the environment.