What the law guarantees will be bought, and where it may legally come from

Scarcer, pricier and more documented, the mandate curve rising against finite waste, the direction written in law. The 2030 barrel is being bid for today.

Efficiency and collection technology widen supply at the margins, the mandate's arithmetic outrunning the gains by design, technology chasing law. Innovation is enrolled, not exempt.

Aviation's mandate reaching into every kitchen's grease, the same litre feeding jets as trucks, the queue lengthening at the fryer. Your chip pan has a boarding pass now.

Fierce and formal, plants competing through premiums and term structures, the seller's market by legislation. Competition so regulated it has a compliance officer.

Collection infrastructure, aggregation capacity and certified origin chains, the picks and shovels of the mandate gold rush. Sell the certainty, buy the logistics.

Collection expansion in new regions, better aggregation in old ones, and the steady march of documentation turning informal oil into tradable tonnes. Supply grows where paperwork learns to walk.

They compete for polyolefins while fuels want the fats, the real contest being for attention and capital, and both markets are rising on the same policy tide. Plastics to chemistry, dinner to fuel, no overlap yet.

It would halve to technical demand overnight, the compliance premium being the engine, which is why we read politics as closely as analyses. The market's floor is written in law.

Locally and seasonally yes, structurally no, mandates growing faster than collection worldwide, the deficit by design. Sell the truth, it happens to be bullish.

It will keep trying: aviation obligations grow faster than waste oil supply, so SAF plants bid the same litres away from biodiesel and HVO. There is no scenario where certified waste oil goes unsold, only scenarios where it goes to a different buyer at a better price.

ReFuelEU Aviation obliges fuel suppliers at EU airports to blend a minimum share of sustainable aviation fuel: 2 % from 2025, 6 % by 2030, 20 % by 2035, 34 % by 2040, 42 % by 2045 and 70 % by 2050. Inside that total there is a separate synthetic fuel sub-mandate of 1.2 % by 2030, 5 % by 2035 and 35 % by 2050. It came into force in October 2023 and is an obligation rather than a target.

Under Regulation (EU) 2024/1157, exports of non-hazardous plastic waste to non-OECD countries are banned from 21 November 2026. From 21 May 2026 exports to OECD countries move to the notification procedure, meaning prior written consent rather than green-list simplicity. From 21 May 2029 a non-OECD country may request a derogation by demonstrating environmentally sound management, which the Commission must assess positively before the ban lifts for that country.

No. Those provisions govern shipments of waste out of the EU. Importing waste-derived feedstock into the EU is a separate question, governed by the classification of the material, the receiving installation's permit, and where relevant the animal by-product rules. What the export ban does is change the balance of material inside Europe, and that is what moves your price.

There is no country list. What decides it is whether the material can be certified under a scheme the buyer accepts, whether the chain of custody holds, and whether the origin survives the buyer's own due diligence. In practice South East Asia, China and the United States are the large exporters, with trade measures and duties that change the economics rather than the legality. Ask us about the specific corridor before you assume it works.

The demand created by ReFuelEU Aviation and by PPWR is written into regulation with dates and percentages, and obliged parties face penalties for missing it. That is as close to guaranteed as a market gets. What is not guaranteed is the price, the multiplier treatment in a given member state, or which technology captures the volume. We are careful to keep those apart.

Because it is carved out of the same total. When the SAF mandate reaches 20 % in 2035, 5 percentage points of that are reserved for synthetic fuels made from hydrogen and captured carbon, not from your material. The bio-based portion therefore grows more slowly than the headline number, and that difference compounds after 2035.

It has to find a home inside Europe or the OECD, because the non-OECD route closes. Mixed rigids, heavily printed film and anything expensive to sort will feel that first. For chemical recycling that is an opportunity rather than a problem, because pyrolysis tolerates contamination that mechanical recycling cannot.

No. We do not publish price assessments and we do not republish anyone else's, because the numbers that matter are assessed by agencies under licence. What we will tell you is the direction of travel and the reasoning behind it, so you can judge it yourself rather than take it on trust.