14 September 2023, EU: Our member CropLife Netherlands, through the STORL Foundation and in joint partnership with 3 other national agricultural associations, has put in place a collection scheme of plant protection products containers operating in the whole country.
For our industry, plastic containers are necessary as they ensure that crop protection products are delivered safely to end users, and help to protect them during application. Yet, in Europe, the overall recycling rate was 34.6% for plastic waste and 38% for plastic packaging in 2020.
Our industry has a role to play in improving these numbers, but this can only be done through schemes that are practical and cost-efficient for European farmers.
This is the case of the STORL container management scheme: growers just need to rinse their containers and then store them in specific STORL bags that are given to them with every purchase of plant protection products.
Full bags can be disposed of free of charge. Farmers can register on the STORL website and get the bags picked up by a press truck, or they can bring them to a local collection point. The containers collected will then be recycled.
The collection of containers with residual content is also in the pipeline and should start as early as 2024. This collection will be organized every two years in every Dutch region.
CropLife Netherlands’ becomes the 21st country joining the 2030 commitments on the circular economy, which aim at establishing an average 75% collection rate of plastic pesticide containers across the EU and ensuring that a container collection scheme is available in 100% of EU member states.
