17.06.2025
As environmental concerns and legislative pressures mount globally, innovation in plastics recycling and sustainable materials is no longer a niche pursuit; it is a commercial imperative. For UK businesses at the forefront of these developments, the European Patent Office (EPO) provides a valuable resource: Plastics in Transition, a technology platform that provides valuable patent information on the circular plastics economy.
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For UK businesses at the forefront of these developments, the European Patent Office (EPO) provides a valuable resource: Plastics in Transition, a technology platform that provides valuable patent information on the circular plastics economy.
The platform compiles patent information in three main areas:
For each of these areas, the platform provides access to large amount of publicly available patent information held by the EPO. It enables you to identify patents mapped to 70 relevant concepts of plastics waste management technologies and new alternative materials; retrieve descriptive statistics for each plastics-related concept; and discover the Espacenet query used to identify patents within a given concept and tailor it to your specific needs.
The EPO has also published two reports in this area.
The most recent report – Plastics in transition: Technologies for plastics waste management – was published in April 2025 and examines innovation trends in plastics waste management in the period 1975-2023.
It found that plastics waste management as a share of total patenting activity “has increased significantly, growing eighteenfold from 1990 to 2023 and four times faster than international patent families (IPFs) in all technology fields combined”. The compound annual growth rate increased from 6% in 2010-2014 to 14% from 2015 to 2019 and 22% from 2020 to 2023.
The report also found that the 2020s have seen significant changes in the leading technologies in the field of plastics waste management. Pyrolysis has overtaken mechanical processing of used plastics as the most patented technology, while chemolysis consolidates its third place. Packaging recycling entered the top five most patented technologies for the first time after 2020, while plastics waste recycling in the automotive sector was an important but less dynamic area of recycling innovation.
One of the striking findings in the report from a UK point of view is that the UK has the most startups that have filed European patent applications in plastics waste management (18), well ahead of France (11) and Germany (9). 1
One of these startups is Recycleye, an AI-driven waste recognition and sorting system that waste processing facilities can use to quickly and accurately sort waste. Its founders, Victor Dewulf and Peter Hedley, won the European Inventor Award Young Inventors Prize in 2022.
The EPO also published an in-depth report in 2021, Patents for tomorrow's plastics: Global innovation trends in recycling, circular design and alternative sources, which found that, between 2010 and 2019, the UK ranked 8th globally in IPFs for plastic recycling technologies, with 436 IPFs. 2
In the bioplastics domain, the UK was ranked 7th globally, with 1,654 IPFs, led by top applicants such as Unilever, British American Tobacco, and Invista Textiles. 3
According to the 2021 report, chemical and biological recycling technologies accounted for over 9,000 IPFs between 2010 and 2019, nearly double those for mechanical recycling. 4
While older technologies such as pyrolysis peaked in patenting around 2014, emerging methods such as plastic-to-monomer depolymerisation and biological recycling using enzymes and microbes have gained momentum.
The report also identified the significant commercialisation gap: US start-ups and scale-ups have generated four times more IPFs than their European counterparts (338 versus 84 IPFs) in chemical and biological recycling, suggesting room for growth in European and UK industry-led innovation. 5
Given the importance and growth of this area, keeping track of patent and innovation developments is imperative and the “Plastics in Transition” platform is a useful resource for UK innovators and business leaders. In particular, it can help companies and researchers in the following tasks:
Given the UK’s strong scientific base and policy support for net-zero and circular economy transitions, the commercial opportunity in plastics innovation is clear. But to capitalise on it, businesses must review patenting opportunities and ensure their innovations are protected globally.
From recycling innovations to biodegradable polymers, the EPO's "Plastics in Transition" platform and the two recent EPO reports offer valuable insight for UK businesses. By leveraging the resources available, companies can better position themselves in a competitive, fast-evolving sector – ensuring they achieve commercial success and contribute to sustainability.
1 Plastics in transition: Technologies for plastics waste management (2025), figure 10 (page 36).
2 https://link.epo.org/web/patents_for_tomorrows_plastics_study_en.pdf, table 2.2.1 (page 20).
3 Ibid., Table 3.2.1 (page 41).
4 Ibid., Page 9.
5 Patents for tomorrow's plastics: Global innovation trends in recycling, circular design and alternative sources (2021), page 5.
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