Can Chemical Recycling Solve The World’s Plastic Problem?

Plastics recycling is failing.

Globally, over 350 million metric tons of plastic are produced annually, but according to the OECD, only 14 to 18 percent of that is recycled.

As for India, it’s even bleaker.

The recycling rate stands at about 8.4 percent, a number that has been on the decline, even as the public has become more aware of the plastic waste crisis. While we’re all so shocked at the amount of plastic waste we generate each day, virgin plastic production keeps increasing four or five percent year-over-year.

China used to be able to profitably recycle much of the world’s plastic waste. But that came to a halt in 2018, and now we have to deal with it domestically. Problem is, most plastics just aren’t recyclable. And even those are degrading in quality each time they’re remade, meaning they’ll eventually end up in the landfill too. So we can’t recycle our way out of this problem. Or can we?

Mechanical recycling won’t save us. That is, chopping plastic up, melting it down, and remaking it, the way that we do now.

Instead, the industry is betting big on something called chemical recycling, which can handle all types of plastic waste. This new technology can take those plastics, break them down into the raw materials and make brand new quality plastics out of them, which gives you a much bigger expansion in terms of potential end markets. With governments around the world increasingly banning single-use plastics, industry groups like the American Chemistry Council are hoping that chemical recycling can save both the industry and the environment.

Companies like Brightmark, Plastic Energy, and Agilyx are now trying to turn
plastic into fuel and plastic back into plastic. We are going to have plastics in the environment for the foreseeable future, and I want to find what is the most optimal way to reduce waste and increase the environmental sustainability aspect of those products that we use. But skepticism abounds. After all, plastic made from scratch is actually cheaper than recycled plastic, so how will the economics even work out? And can turning plastic into fossil fuels really be considered recycling? Shouldn’t we just focus on producing less in the first place? It’s up for debate.

There are thousands of varieties of plastics, but seven main categories, of which only two can be recycled by traditional means. PET, which water bottles are made of, and HDPE, used in things like milk jugs and shampoo containers. Sorting plastics and removing contamination is labor-intensive work.

And so since the 1980s, the United States, alongside other nations like the U.K. and Australia, sent much of its plastic waste to China, where cheap labor allowed Chinese producers to profitably recycle it. But as single stream recycling became the norm and plastic was thrown in the same bin as glass, cardboard, and other materials, China noticed increasingly high contamination levels. After years of warning, the country set strict new contamination limits on imports that were nearly impossible to meet, leaving wealthy nations scrambling to find new overseas markets. What we have done over the last few years is to export to countries that had less infrastructure of what we have and then created a much bigger problem. So why not just develop the infrastructure to deal with it locally?

Basically, mechanical recycling in India just isn’t profitable without incentives or subsidies.

Virgin plastic is incredibly cheap and we are seeing traditional mechanical recycling operations shutting down because it simply does not pay. They cannot sell their recycled plastic at a rate that would justify paying people to collect it. But even as states like California try to prop up their curbside recycling programs and centers with subsidies, there’s still just so much that can go wrong.

While number one and number two plastics are recyclable, about 70 percent end up in a landfill or incinerator anyway. It’s too contaminated or it’s too difficult to separate. And then the recycled polymer is sort of low-grade.
And then on top of that, it’s typically too expensive. Absent strong regulation, public pressure, or true altruism, there’s just no reason why a corporation would pay more for lower quality recycled plastic. So we need to find something else. And then, of course, something else would be switch materials or source reduction, useless.

But obviously, that would be bad news for the plastic industry.
So I think they see the only way forward is chemical recycling.

Enter chemical recycling, a process that can break down any plastic, type one through seven, into its molecular building blocks and then theoretically convert it into virgin-quality plastic, chemicals, or diesel and petrol fuels.
There’s been a huge investment in these chemical recycling technologies in
recent years. They’ve been very hyped by industry.

They’re saying that these technologies are going to allow them to capture
a much broader stream of plastics and turn them back into plastics like new, so we could get more of a circular economy with that. The most common technology used in this process, pyrolysis, is not new. It involves heating up material like waste plastic in an oxygen-starved environment, which causes it to break down into a mix of simpler compounds, which are then used as building blocks for new products.

But critiques abound.

Tangri’s organization, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives,
or GAIA recently released a report which concluded that no chemical
recycling facility in the world is turning plastic back into plastic at a commercial scale yet, though there have been many attempts.

The companies themselves though, beg to differ, Brightmark, founded in 2016, is building a commercial-scale plastics-to-fuel plant in Indiana, U.S. and aims to process 100,000 tons of plastic by 2021. It will sell fuel from this plant to BP.

So ultimately, our goal is to produce less combustible fuels.

There are at least 14 percent less greenhouse gas emissions associated with the fuels that we produce versus pulling crude oil or natural gas out of the ground. In addition to fuels, Brightmark’s process also produces paraffin waxes, and Powell says the tech is ready to convert plastic back into plastic. They just need customers.

I think the market is there and I think what you would see from us in the future is relationships with folks that achieve our goals around circularity and their goals around circularity, because we can do it now. But in the meantime, Tangri questions whether turning plastic into fossil fuel is really a solution worth supporting.

Is plastic-to-fuel better than say, I don’t know, syngas derived from coal? Yeah, probably. But who uses that? It’s on its way out. These are not clean fuels, whether they are absolutely the dirtiest or they’re the second dirtiest or they’re the third dirtiest, they are clearly fossil fuels and they are highly contaminated fossil fuels.

Then there’s U.K.-based Plastic Energy, which is turning plastic back into plastic on a commercial scale at two facilities in Spain.
Much like Brightmark, the company started off producing fuels, also through a pyrolysis-based process that converted plastic waste into naphtha and diesel. But now Monreal says they’re totally focused on plastic-to-plastic recycling. Since April this year, 100 percent of our TACOIL is used to create new plastics. They are committed to the creation of a circular economy for plastics going forward. Monreal says that Europe’s ambitious environmental goals provide unique incentives for this type of technology to flourish. They have commitments to double the recycling quotas in Europe per year by 2025.

With plastic, glass, and cardboard already separated at the source, Plastic
Energy can acquire difficult to recycle plastics more easily and economically than in developed countries such as the U.S.

However, it’s a disagreement over priorities.
Basically, there’s not a consensus on whether chemical recycling will represent an important part of the plastic waste solution or an expensive distraction from what many believe ought to be the real priority, making less plastic. There are people who embrace chemical recycling as an emerging technology with an evolution path. There are others more focused on reducing the amount of plastics that we use as a country and as a world.
Not surprisingly, there are big policy disagreements as well. For example, the fact that plastic industry groups enthusiastically support chemical recycling while opposing policies like single-use plastic bans or plastic taxes leaves many skeptical that the industry would ever pursue eco-friendliness over profits.

The industry is investing so much money in chemical recycling because they really want to convince us that they can continue to churn out ever large quantities of plastic and solve the problem downstream.
Tangri and many other environmentalists believe that instead of pursuing
chemical recycling, the plastic waste problem is best addressed through legislation, in particular, Extended Producer Responsibility laws that force plastic producers to bear the cost for the environmental impacts of their products. There are proposals that would impose a tax on plastic producers proportional to the environmental and health harm that they cause. The idea is that this would lead to fewer plastics production overall, drive growth in the market for plastic alternatives and incentivize consumers to turn to reusable materials instead.

But many champions of chemical recycling support a more free-market
approach. If virgin plastics cost more because there’s a tax on them, that
helps us out. But I think that open market competition is really the true way, in the long run, to foster the innovation and the efficiency to drive higher recycling rates across all plastic types.

Industry groups like the American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Industry Association, say that consumer demand and corporate pledges will make recycled plastic an attractive option, even if virgin plastic remains cheaper. Others though say legislation and chemical recycling both have a role to play. Regulatory and governmental frameworks have really driven us to where we’re at the point now where there is an absolute demand to deal with the issues of post-use plastics. In the future, maybe there won’t be a need for plastics and we find a better way of doing things. But for the foreseeable, we are going to have plastics in the environment. And so, what we do is already environmentally better. It will ultimately get even better as time goes on. But for now, serious doubts about chemical recycling’s efficacy, environmental footprint, and scalability remain, leading many to withhold support in favor of starting with simpler solutions.

Overall, I always like to start with the easiest, most obvious solutions. And I think there are many, many places where we could just use less plastic without compromising our quality of life. I think it’ll take a lot more than just coming up with a handful of amazing technologies to fix this.