Plastic Market
Europe's share of global plastics production has halved since 2006 and its circular share has stalled, while recycled content becomes compulsory. What that combination means for a supplier.
Nexam Chemical sells into European plastics converting. That industry is shrinking relative to the rest of the world while the rules it operates under get stricter, and both halves of that sentence matter to the investment case.
Europe is losing share, fast
Plastics Europe's Fast Facts 2025, covering 2024, puts Europe's share of global plastics production at 12%, down from 22% in 2006. Global production grew 4.1% in the year and 16.3% since 2018; European volumes merely stabilized after what the association calls a record contraction in 2023.
The circular share of European production has also stalled. It reached 15.4% in 2024 and has not moved meaningfully since 2022, despite being the one metric European policy is designed to raise.
A shrinking industry with a rising compliance burden is not automatically a bad market for a supplier. It is a bad market for volume and a good one for anything that lets a converter meet a requirement without new capital.
The demand for recycled content is legislated, not cyclical
From 2030, Regulation (EU) 2025/40 sets minimum recycled content of 30% for contact-sensitive PET packaging, 10% for other contact-sensitive plastics, 30% for single-use beverage bottles and 35% for other plastic packaging, rising in 2040 to 50%, 25%, 65% and 65%. California has run its own version since 2022, priced at twenty cents per pound of shortfall.
Supply is the constraint that follows. The EU recycled 67.5% of packaging waste in 2023 but only 55% is required of plastic by 2030, and most member states were below that, some under 30%. Collection is improving; the usability of what is collected is the open question.
What the company says about its own market
Nexam Chemical's recent reporting describes exactly the split above. Its first quarter of 2026 was headlined with recycling growth of 89% in what it called a wait-and-see market, with group sales down 11% and its chemicals segment down 25%. Its second quarter reported record quarterly sales of 60.0 MSEK, up 11%, and the first positive operating result in the company's history, with masterbatch sales up 7% and chemicals up 16%.
One segment tracks the regulated pull, the other tracks industrial demand. The quarterly figures, with their sources, are in the data room.
What this page does not have
We do not carry resin prices. A recycled polyethylene or rPET price series would be the most useful single number on this page, and the sources that publish it do so commercially, under terms that do not allow republication. Until there is a source that can be cited and linked, this page states the volumes and leaves the prices out rather than quoting a figure no reader can check.
Sources
- Plastics Europe, Plastics the Fast Facts 2025, 2024 data.
- Eurostat, packaging waste statistics, 2023 data.
- Regulation (EU) 2025/40, Article 7.
- Nexam Chemical interim reports for the first and second quarters of 2026.
Independent research, not affiliated with Nexam Chemical and not investment advice.