Sustainable Plastics - May/June 2022 - 20

Q&A
The Amsterdam
facility.
Mining: the
modern way
Plastics have many benefi ts. Cheap,
versatile and lightweight, their
importance to daily life is diffi cult to
overstate, and adequate substitutes with
the same range of properties aren't easy
to fi nd. So why are we wasting so much
of this important resource? Sustainable
Plastics spoke with Lucy van Keulen,
commercial director at Umincorp,
about the company's breakthrough in
sustainable plastics recycling.
L
20
et's start with the
name of the company,
Umincorp. What does
it mean exactly?
The name stands for Urban
Mining Corp., and it means exactly
what we do: we mine raw
materials and resources from
urban environments. The city
is a rich source, far richer than
any source in Uganda or Venezuela,
where you might want to
be sourcing raw materials from.
The idea actually came from
a professor named Peter Rem,
who leads the Resources and
Recycling Group at Delft University
of Technology, which is
also where both the founders of
Umincorp studied. Umincorp is
the direct result of the concept
May/June 2022
he developed. As a company,
we are focused on the recovery
of plastics from household
waste. To reach green commitments,
we urgently need to better
use our waste as a mine for
plastics.
So better resource management,
is that the aim?
Resources are key; after all,
many of the raw materials we
use are finite. Oil, for instance,
which is the basis of 99% of
all plastics. It's this realisation
that has pushed the EU to start
playing a central role in building
awareness of the need for better
resource management. The
EU has formulated a directive
calling for Europe to become
far less dependent on virgin
resources and in pushing for a
more sustainable approach to
resource use.
Take, for example, the way
a laptop is designed. A laptop
contains plural rare earth metals.
At the end of life, we should
not be sending it overseas to
a country like Vietnam to be
disassembled or disposed of.
Lucy van Keulen.
No, we need to keep it here, in
our own territory. We can recycle
and reuse the resources in
that laptop right here instead of
having to purchase new. We're
depleting the Earth of these
resources, while we've actually
already got a lot that we are not
using at all eff iciently. We need
to eff iciently recover and reuse
continued on page 22
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