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Plastics are ubiquitous in modern life, yet recycling rates remain insufficient after initial use. The EU's Circular Economy Action Plan targets a 50% recycling rate for plastic packaging by 2025, posing significant challenges, especially in the Southern and Eastern Danube regions due to waste management deficits and lack of industrial processing knowledge.

The Plan-C project, a consortium of 14 partners from Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, and Moldova, aims to address these challenges. By fostering transnational cooperation among plastic processors, producers, and the machine industry, the project seeks to drive the transformation of the plastics value chain in the Danube Region towards circularity. Achieving this requires close collaboration to change mindsets, behaviors, and business paradigms. The goal is to enhance the competitiveness of key actors, contributing to the EU Strategy for the Danube Region (EUSDR) Priority Area 8 objectives.

Using technology transfer and a design thinking process, the partners will co-create and demonstrate circular plastic prototypes, resulting in a Circular Plastics Guideline to build regional knowledge and capacities. Strategic partners and policy stakeholders will help integrate this strategy into regional innovation strategies (RIS3).

Similarly, project partners and machine firms will develop circular solutions for each phase of the machine lifecycle, and create digital business models summarized in a Guideline for Circularity in the Machine Industry, to be integrated into RIS3 as well.

Overall, at least 140 enterprises from the plastics and machine industries in the Danube region are collaborating to create a vision for a transformed plastics value chain focused on circularity. This effort demonstrates the benefits of reusing and recycling plastics, as well as maintaining, redistributing, refurbishing, remanufacturing, and recycling machines. The final Transnational Action Plan to embed circular economy principles in the holistic plastics value chain targets SMEs, large enterprises, business support organizations, sectoral agencies, and public authorities, aiming to increase the capacity of at least 70 organizations to implement circular concepts along the plastics value chain.