What is plasmix? Does it still make sense to talk about it?

When plastic recycling started to gain momentum, a term appeared that for years played a central role: plasmix. Plasmix is the mix of heterogeneous plastics that remains after separate waste collection. In practice, this word identified the leftovers that remained after recyclable materials like PET, PE, and PP had been separated from collected plastics.

What makes plasmix unique is its nature as a heterogeneous blend of plastics that are often hard to combine with each other, making them more difficult to manage. In fact, the typical fate of plastics discarded during the collection process was to end up in landfills or incinerators, with a consequent environmental impact.

For this reason, plasmix was immediately seen as both a major challenge and a potential opportunity. There was significant attention on how to reuse even these less noble residues to give a second life to as much plastic as possible. Our company was an early pioneer in this area and developed a compound made from heterogeneous plastic materials. With this mixture, in 2011 we produced the first recycling container made from post-consumer plastic waste.

Today, things have partly changed. The technologies used to sort materials have greatly improved, and at the same time, the experience of operators has also grown. Individual plastics can now be separated and reused more effectively than in the past. As a result, the percentage of plasmix remaining after separate collection has decreased, since it’s now easier to separate and valorize individual plastics.

This is why nowadays we hear less about plasmix. But even though it is no longer at the center of the discussion, plasmix hasn’t disappeared. In fact, today it can be reused more easily than before, even if often in less visible ways. We, for example, have continued in this direction. Our Utilgreen line is born precisely from plasmix and gives shape to sturdy, functional household tools made by recovering mixed post-consumer plastics.

This leads us to consider one of today’s key issues: it’s not always clear what is meant by “recycled plastic.” On the market, many products are labeled as “recycled,” but it’s not specified whether they are made from post-consumer plastic (material truly recovered from the environment, such as household waste) or post-industrial plastic (factory scraps that have never left the production cycle).

In reality, you can sometimes tell: if a recycled plastic product is very colorful, it’s more likely to come from post-industrial plastics. These are “cleaner” and easier to pigment. On the other hand, with plasmix, it’s harder to achieve bright colors because the starting mixture is rougher and less uniform. Our Utilgreen line is neither colorful nor shiny, and this reflects our choice. Its value doesn’t lie in its outward appearance but in what it’s made of.

So the difference is not just aesthetic, but environmental: reusing post-consumer plastic really means removing plastic from the environment. That’s why we still believe plasmix makes sense. It’s one of many tools we can use to create useful, durable, and more environmentally sustainable plastic products.