Proposed closures at three Scandinavian sites follow an acquisition valued at around £90 million and come amid a wave of cancelled chemical recycling projects across Europe.
Viridor has proposed closing its three European chemical recycling facilities in Oslo, Skive and Malmö, saying current market conditions in the EU and UK do not support investment in advanced plastics recycling at the pace or scale required.
The proposal covers the entire Quantafuel platform, which Viridor acquired for around £90 million in stages between 2023 and early 2024. It is subject to local consultation and negotiation, and the company said no final decisions had been made - but the technology, it said, has been proved even as the economics have not followed.
At the Skive plastics-to-liquids plant in Denmark, dry yields reached 70 to 75 per cent - far above the 30 per cent many in the industry had expected when the platform was acquired. That performance was not enough to overcome what Viridor described as a market that defaults to the cheapest available option.
"The technology works," said Lee Hodder, Managing Director for Carbon Capture and Circular Solutions at Viridor. "But the problem is the broader business reality. Waste and recycling markets are shaped by policy: when governments create clear, stable incentives and properly enforced rules, markets respond and investment follows. When they don't, the system defaults to the cheapest option available. Today, that is making new plastic from virgin feedstock."
Viridor wants three things from policymakers: stronger measures to keep European plastic waste in European recycling systems rather than losing it to cheaper virgin imports, enforceable recycled-content mandates with confirmed timelines in both the EU and UK, and faster implementation of harmonised end-of-waste rules for chemically recycled plastics. Any closures would not affect Resource Denmark's mechanical recycling and decarbonisation business, which continues to operate separately.
A sector in retreat
The proposal follows a pattern that has been building across Europe for more than a year. Of 65 chemical recycling projects planned across the continent with a combined capacity of 2.8 million tonnes a year, only 18 were operational by October 2025, producing just 290,000 tonnes. Dow terminated its 120,000-tonne Böhlen plant in Germany in August 2025, and ExxonMobil shelved planned investments at Antwerp and Rotterdam a month later, citing overly restrictive mass balance rules.
Underpinning this is the a price gap between recycled and virgin polymers that has widened as a global oversupply of cheap petrochemicals - driven largely by Chinese capacity expansions - has pushed virgin plastic prices down sharply. Plastics Recyclers Europe reported that the broader recycling sector lost almost one million tonnes of capacity between 2023 and the end of 2025, with 2024 recording the largest contraction ever measured. Viridor itself closed its Rochester mechanical plastics recycling facility in August 2025 for the same reasons.
Policy that has not yet bitten
Both the EU and UK have recycled content requirements on the statute book, but neither framework is generating the demand signal that would appear to make chemical recycling investable.
Under the EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, which entered into force in February 2025 and applies from August 2026, plastic beverage bottles must contain at least 30 per cent recycled content from 2030, rising to 65 per cent by 2040. Chemical recycling counts as eligible feedstock - but with enforcement mechanisms still to come and the first deadline four years away, the targets have not yet translated into offtake contracts or firm pricing.
In the UK, the Plastic Packaging Tax charges £210.82 per tonne on packaging containing less than 30 per cent recycled plastic. Mass balance accounting rules that would allow producers to count chemically recycled feedstock are due in 2027. Until then, the route from pyrolysis output to compliance credit remains unclear for much of the industry. A recent report from Ecosurety and RECOUP found that operational capacity covers just 23 per cent of the infrastructure needed to recycle all plastic packaging placed on the UK market, with more than 200,000 tonnes of reprocessing capacity lost since 2024.
Viridor's position is that the policy architecture exists in outline but not in practice - and that without enforcement, the system will continue to favour virgin production over recycling.
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