Recycling guarantees more than 100 million euros of GDP

Recycling guarantees more than 100 million euros of GDP.

A study commissioned by Sociedade Ponto Verde concludes that recycling avoids 116 thousand tons of CO2 and multiplies investments in the economy.

For every euro of added value created by the activity, an additional 1.25 euros of profit will appear in the rest of the economy, according to a study by environmental consultant 3Drivers and experts from the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon. GDP would lose 71 million euros without recycling. And, with it, the release of an amount of CO2 equivalent to 16 thousand airplane trips around the Earth is avoided.

The study was commissioned by Sociedade Ponto Verde (SPV), which manages the recycling of most packaging in the country. The objective was not to evaluate recycling itself, but rather the impact of an integrated management system – a figure created legally in 1997, in which manufacturers and importers transfer the responsibility of disposing of their packaging waste to a common society.

“We wanted to see the goodness of this principle in numbers, after a few years”, says Luís Veiga Martins, director general of SPV.

In the study accounts, the integrated system for recycling ends up adding 147 million euros in gross added value to the economy in one year, 80 million in additional salaries and 391 million in turnover.

The figures were calculated through a “life cycle analysis”, which counts everything, from the moment the citizen goes to the ecopoint to deposit the garbage, to the commercialization of products made from recycled packaging.