Polypropylene (PP) Recycling Guide
Recycled polypropylene is the least predictable polyolefin feed, and the one where Nexam Chemical publishes no named product.
Polypropylene is the workhorse of rigid packaging, closures, automotive interiors and nonwovens. It is collected in most European kerbside systems, and recycled polypropylene has a real market. It is also the polyolefin where the recycled grade is hardest to predict, because the stream that arrives is the most mixed.
What arrives at the line
A recycled polypropylene feed is rarely one material. Consumer packaging brings in polyethylene from caps and films, adhesives and inks from labels, and residues from whatever the container held. Automotive and industrial streams bring in filled grades, where mineral filler changes stiffness and impact independently of the polymer itself. Recyclers sort by density and by near-infrared, which separates polymer types but does not separate grades.
The result is that two deliveries with the same specification sheet can run differently, which is a harder problem for a converter than material that is simply worse.
What degrades, and what it shows up as
Polypropylene degrades mainly by chain scission. Unlike polyethylene, which can crosslink as well as break, polypropylene under shear and heat predominantly breaks, so melt flow rate rises with each pass: the material becomes thinner in the melt, not thicker. Antioxidant packages are consumed along the way, so a recycled grade also starts its next life with less protection than a virgin one.
On a line this looks like drop in melt strength and elongational viscosity, and it shows first in operations that stretch or support the melt: thermoforming, extrusion coating, foaming and thin-wall injection molding with long flow paths. Impact strength at low temperature is the property most often out of specification in the finished part.
What the rules will require
From 2030, Regulation (EU) 2025/40 requires 35% recycled content in plastic packaging that is not contact-sensitive, rising to 65% in 2040, averaged per manufacturing plant and per year. Most polypropylene packaging falls in that category. Contact-sensitive polypropylene packaging faces 10% in 2030 and 25% in 2040, the lower band the regulation sets for contact-sensitive plastics other than PET, because food contact with recycled material is separately gated by Regulation (EU) 2022/1616.
On the supply side, plastic packaging recycling across the EU is short of its own 55% target in most member states, with rates from 23.0% to 59.5% in 2023.
What Nexam Chemical offers here
Less than for the other two polymers, on the evidence of its own site. The company's product index says the portfolio spans chain extenders, crosslinkers, compatibilisers, impact modifiers and functional masterbatches, and it has product pages for PET and rPET and for recycled polyethylene. We did not find a named polypropylene grade or a polypropylene application page.
That absence is worth stating plainly rather than filling in by analogy. Compatibilisers are exactly the chemistry a mixed polypropylene stream needs, and the company lists the category, but a category on an index page is not a product with an application behind it.
Sources
- Regulation (EU) 2025/40, Article 7.
- Commission Regulation (EU) 2022/1616 on recycled plastic in food contact.
- Eurostat, packaging waste statistics, 2023 data.
- Nexam Chemical product pages.
Independent research, not affiliated with Nexam Chemical and not investment advice.