He spends his life in Spain between Barcelona – his hometown –, working from home, and Valencia, where the used plastics trading company he created in early 2023, with five partners, under the name of Reciplast, has a simple office. . But, in reality, Alex Moreno March, a Catalan in his forties, is a trader on a planetary scale. Its job is to put in contact public or private companies that collect plastic waste from individuals and industrialists in Oceania, Latin America, Asia and Europe, with the companies that will then transform the residues, on all these continents, in pellets or flakes called to know a new life in the form of garden hoses, shopping bags or water bottles.
“We forge partnerships with those who recover the plastics and then organize the transport, by boat or plane, to recyclers and end users of waste”, explains the young entrepreneur. After six months of existence, Reciplast, whose shareholder is the Spanish recycling company Power Resources, already buys and resells several thousand tonnes of plastic per month, starting with polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used to manufacture bottles. mineral water. The market is booming. Although there are four or five major players in the world present in this trade, a multitude of small structures such as Reciplast are appearing, a sign that the journey of plastics has a bright future ahead of it – even if countries such as China, since 2018, or Indonesia, since 2019, no longer want to receive it from Westerners, so as to no longer be the world destination for recycling.
In 2022, the plastics market was estimated between 416 billion and 551 billion euros depending on the sources, including 43 billion euros in recycling-related activities. In France, the Ecological Transition Agency (Ademe) assesses the market for the collection and preparation of used plastics at 200 million euros, that of regeneration, at 500 million euros. An extraordinary windfall for some, a disaster for others.
A disaster, because in 2021 the World Wide Fund for Nature claimed that the cost of plastic to society, the environment and the economy was “ten times higher” than its cost of production. “Without international efforts to curb production, the cost of plastic will soon be $7.1 trillion [6 520 milliards d’euros] per year, more than the equivalent of the GDP of Germany, Australia and Canada combined”he predicted.
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