The European Commission's Joint Research Centre has published the most rigorous LCA work to date on plastics, biopolymers, and end-of-life. Read carefully, it supports several of the assumptions behind our model.
I spent a long time in foreign and trade policy before joining GRØNBLÅ as Co-founder and Chairman, Europe, and one of the harder lessons of that work is that policy documents matter, not because they change behaviour overnight, but because they set the frame in which decisions get made for years afterwards. When the Joint Research Centre, the European Commission's in-house science service, publishes a major LCA on plastics, every regulator, every procurement team, and every standards body takes notes.
The JRC's plastics LCA report contains, by my count, ten distinct findings that support the closed-loop model GRØNBLÅ is built on. None of these are quotes I picked to flatter the company; they're the report's own words. What follows is a working note on what they say and why they matter.
The JRC writes: "Compost can serve as a soil amendment, maintaining soil carbon content and possibly replacing mineral fertilisers." This is the unglamorous but load-bearing claim. If compost is treated as fertiliser-equivalent at the EU policy level, the off-take economics work, and the entire downstream half of our loop has a place to go.
The report lists EN 13432:2000 as the prerequisite standard for considering industrial composting a viable treatment route. We're certified to it. That alignment isn't a coincidence, it's the certification we sought specifically because it's the one EU policy gives weight to.
Per the JRC: "Biopolymers under industrial composting conditions… PLA 44–95% [biodegradation rate]." The wide range matters. It rejects the marketing simplification that PLA "breaks down" or "doesn't break down" as a binary, and makes the case for what we keep saying: industrial conditions, the right microbes, the right time, and you get strong real-world performance. Outside those conditions, you don't.
The report explicitly counts "peat substitution and carbon sequestration" alongside mineral fertiliser replacement as a benefit of compost utilisation. This is the bag-of-peat-free-compost-at-the-end argument we've been making for years, and the JRC has now made it for us with European Commission backing.
One of the more interesting paragraphs: "When compostable items are used, a single waste stream including discarded cutlery/tableware and food residues can be separately collected for composting, rather than being routed to incineration or disposal as mixed residual waste." Every venue we deploy at runs a one-bin scheme at the consumer-facing end. The JRC has now spelled out, in the language regulators use, why that's preferable to multi-stream sorting in this context.
The report highlights wheat straw, maize stover, sugarcane bagasse, wood chips, and organic matter from wastewater as preferred feedstocks for bio-based polymers. Our PLA is sugarcane-derived, with the cultivation upstream taking advantage of bagasse for energy. The framing matters: "food crops vs. plastics" is the wrong fight; "residues vs. virgin extraction" is the right one, and the JRC sides clearly with the latter.
Quoting: "Residual material from biological treatment of bioplastic products … means that no residues of non-biodegraded plastic material are present in the resulting organic material." This is the claim that holds the whole story together. If non-biodegraded fragments make it through to compost, the loop fails, the compost contaminates the soil and the system loses social licence. The JRC affirms what our compost machine data shows: with the right conditions, the residue is gone.
The report spells out the carbon storage logic: "For compost derived from municipal organic waste … carbon not mineralised within 100 years after application can be considered associated with stable organic compounds." A non-trivial fraction of the carbon in our composted output stays in the soil for a century-plus. That's a permanent draw-down, on top of the avoided emissions.
The JRC notes that biodegradable carrier bags and tableware reduce contamination of the organic waste stream, not just by being compostable themselves, but by displacing the fossil-plastic items that would otherwise have gone in the same bin. This is a system-level benefit that doesn't show up in a per-product LCA. It's why we keep saying the loop matters more than the molecule.
The cumulative effect of these ten quotes, taken together, is that the model GRØNBLÅ runs, industrial composting of certified bioplastics, on-site at venues, with off-take to soil amendment, is what a serious, science-led, European-Commission-backed analysis lands on as the right approach. We'd argue that anyway. It's useful to have the JRC argue it for us.
When the Commission's own science service writes the case, the conversation in Brussels and Copenhagen shifts. The frame becomes the question of how, not whether.Jeppe Kofod, Co-founder & Chairman, Europe
For a stadium operator, caterer, or municipality looking at a compostable scheme, three things follow:
I'm cautious about over-reading any single policy document. But this one was carefully done, by people who don't owe anyone a favour, and it lands cleanly on the case we've been making since 2021. That's a useful tailwind. The harder work is still ahead: turning the frame into operational decisions in venues, councils, and procurement offices across Europe.
If you're working on procurement, sustainability reporting, or municipal contracts and want to talk through what the JRC report changes for your work, drop us a note.