ASSORIMAP: Plants to Shut Down As of Today

The shutdown of private recycling plants will lead to an immediate domino effect, paralyzing the national waste system.

Assorimap

Rome, 11 November 2025 - ‘Given the lack of urgent measures to save the sector, the private recycling industry, after years of survival, is giving up: as of today, we are shutting down our plants.’  Walter Regis, president of Assorimap, the National Association of Plastic Recyclers and Regenerators, which represents 90% of the supply chain, announces the extreme measure. ‘We are doing this with a sense of responsibility, aware of the repercussions on the entire country, but continuing to produce with unsustainable losses is now impossible.’

According to Assorimap, the meetings - first at the Mase on 8 October and then at Mimit on 23 October - did not serve to activate the measures necessary to save the sector.
"Almost two months have passed since the last appeal to Minister Pichetto Fratin and more than a month since the meeting convened by the Ministry of the Environment with the promise of a new operational meeting by early November, which has not yet taken place,’ recalls Regis. "What we denounced in October was not a vain warning, nor is this announcement of the shutdown of the plants. We are facing a national emergency that we cannot tackle alone." 

The shutdown of private recycling plants will lead to an immediate domino effect, paralyzing the national waste system. "The yards of storage and sorting centers are already overloaded and at the authorized limits. If we recyclers stop processing the batches altogether, the sorting system will grind to a halt within a few weeks. At that point, there will be no more space to store the plastic collected separately by citizens," explains Regis. 

Already in recent months Assorimap had raised the alarm, presenting incontrovertible data on the collapse of the sector: operating profits fell by 87% from 2021, from 150 million euros to only 7 million in 2023, with a projection towards zero for 2025.
The companie's turnover, since 2022, has fallen 30%. A crisis affecting the entire supply chain, squeezed between energy costs – the highest in Europe – and unsustainable competition from non-EU imports of virgin and recycled plastic at bargain prices.