News and events 

On 17 September 2026, ANALYST presented two connected pieces of work to the EuPC Building & Construction (B&C) Division in Brussels: a mapping of the EU policy landscape shaping Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) chemicals and materials, and the first results from ANALYST's own stakeholder survey testing how that landscape is actually experienced on the ground.

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Part One: a policy landscape in motion

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ANALYST's desk research maps four EU policy pillars bearing on the plastics value chain: the chemicals framework (REACH, CLP, ECHA), the circularity and waste framework (PPWR, the Waste Framework Directive, the Waste Shipment Regulation), industrial and product policy (Ecodesign, the Clean Industrial Deal), and sector-level voluntary initiatives (VinylPlus, the Circular Plastics Alliance, the Critical Chemicals Alliance) — all sitting beneath the EU's Safe and Sustainable by Design framework itself.
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​Several of these moved materially in the past year. REACH's anticipated full revision was shelved in April 2026, with the Commission confirming that regulatory pressure will instead arrive substance-by-substance. Lead in PVC has been restricted since November 2024, with recovered-content exemptions phasing out through 2033 and CLP reclassification deadlines following in November 2026 and May 2028. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation's design-for-recycling grading takes effect this August, with Grade C packaging facing phase-out from 2030. And from November 2026, the revised Waste Shipment Regulation bans plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries until at least 2029.

 

Behind these instruments sits a persistent circularity gap. The EU recycled between 7.8 and 8.7 million tonnes of plastics in 2024, against a 10 million tonne target for 2025, with annual growth slowing sharply from 13.6% in 2022 to just 1.2% in 2024. The EU's circular material use rate stands at 12.2%, against a 24% target for 2030, and Europe's share of global plastics production fell from 22% to 12% between 2006 and 2024.
 

Industry has continued to respond in the meantime. VinylPlus alone has recycled 9.5 million tonnes of PVC since 2000, avoiding an estimated 19.1 million tonnes of CO2. Over €6 billion has gone into moving away from legacy additives over the past 25 years, and advanced XRF and NIR sorting pilots are now isolating legacy lead, MCCPs and restricted phthalates from the waste stream.
 

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Part Two: what industry told us directly

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Building on this landscape, ANALYST's stakeholder survey — fifteen responses spanning industry associations, chemical producers and formulators, converters, and research institutions, with two-thirds working directly with PVC — set out to test how this policy environment is actually experienced.
 

One message came through more consistently than any other, across every section of the survey: regulate better, not more. Respondents rated the current clarity of the EU's regulatory environment for SSbD at just 2.3 out of 5. As one industry association respondent put it: "Industry needs clear, stable and achievable long-term objectives — not a regulatory frenzy with unattainable objectives that get revised later."

Four barriers stood out well above the rest: weak or uncertain market demand, regulatory uncertainty, global competition, and regulatory complexity — each rated a serious barrier by two-thirds or more of respondents. The enablers people want mirror those barriers closely: clearer and more stable regulation, stronger public procurement and demand signals, and harmonised standards and methods topped the list. Notably, the barriers ANALYST's own tools are designed to address — assessment data, shared methodologies, and skills — ranked lowest of the nine tested.

Looking at individual frameworks, REACH emerged as both the most-cited instrument in the survey and the only one where more respondents said it hinders their work than helps it — closing the loop with what the desk research in Part One had already flagged as the sector's most consequential regulatory relationship. By contrast, the Clean Industrial Deal was the sole framework respondents see as genuinely enabling.

Zooming into PVC and B&C specifically, three themes recurred: flexible PVC is under particular pressure at end-of-life, with exemptions to date focused mainly on rigid PVC; restrictions on recyclate containing legacy substances such as lead are, in practice, preventing safe material from staying in circulation; and several respondents argued that long service life should be recognised as a sustainability asset in its own right, paired with traceability and certified recyclability — not penalised as if it were single-use packaging. As one respondent summarised: "B&C is much more than just another PVC discussion."​

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What happens next​

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​​​​Together, these two strands — the policy mapping and the stakeholder evidence — now feed directly into two upcoming ANALYST deliverables: a prioritised list of adoption barriers, and three cross-cutting policy briefs addressing raw material producers, downstream converters (including automotive and construction), and end-of-life and recycling actors respectively.

In parallel, ANALYST-DIGI — the project's open decision-support platform for comparing materials on real environmental, social and economic data — is now in its first live testing cycle with ANALYST's industrial partners, running through 30 September, ahead of a second testing cycle in November. Organisations interested in following the platform's rollout, or being considered for future testing rounds, are welcome to get in touch with the ANALYST team.

ANALYST would like to thank all survey respondents and everyone who joined the discussion in Brussels for their candour and their time.

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