Plastics produced from chemically recycled feedstock cost between 1.5 and 3.5 times more than virgin petrochemical resins, according to a new report from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). The gap, the authors wrote, "is expected to remain substantially more costly for the foreseeable future."

The estimate is the headline finding of the report, released last week through the JRC's publications repository, and it lands at a moment when European policymakers and polymer producers are weighing how chemical recycling should count toward EU recycled-content and packaging targets. The JRC is the Commission's independent scientific research body, and its cost assessment carries weight precisely because it does not come from industry.

Chemical recycling — also marketed as "advanced" or "molecular" recycling — covers a suite of technologies that use solvents or high temperatures to break hard-to-recycle plastics down into their chemical building blocks for reuse. The technologies differ from mechanical recycling, which reprocesses sorted bales into pellets without depolymerising the material.

The JRC's data show how concentrated the European sector is around one process. Eighty percent of chemical recycling facilities in Europe use pyrolysis, a method that decomposes plastics in an oxygen-free chamber heated, on average, to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. That concentration matters for cost analysis: the 1.5x–3.5x premium largely reflects the economics of pyrolysis-derived feedstock, including energy intensity, low yields relative to input tonnage, and the capital cost of the plants themselves.

For buyers of recycled resin — packaging converters, brand owners working toward recycled-content commitments — the report quantifies a price differential that has so far been discussed mostly in anecdotal terms. A premium of that magnitude means chemical recycling remains viable mainly where mechanical feedstock cannot technically serve: mixed, contaminated, or multi-layer plastic waste streams that would otherwise go to energy recovery or landfill.

The finding also frames the policy debate over how chemical recycling output should be counted. If mass-balance accounting allows producers to attribute chemically recycled content to food-grade and other high-specification applications, the cost premium can be absorbed in regulated or premium segments. If EU rules tighten the accounting rules or exclude certain processes, project economics deteriorate further.

The report's language is measured but unambiguous. The JRC does not describe chemical recycling as a dead end; it describes it as an expensive one. The cost differential is structural, not transitional, in the authors' assessment, and no plausible scaling curve closes it in the near term.

What decides what happens next is regulatory, not technological. The European Commission is still finalising the implementing rules that will determine which chemical recycling processes qualify under EU recycled-content targets and how mass-balance allocation is calculated. Those rules — more than any technology improvement — will set the volume of chemically recycled feedstock European producers can profitably place on the market. Watch the implementing acts and the JRC's follow-up assessments for the first hard numbers on qualifying capacity.