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.
In the U.S., 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, v irgin 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 that are degrade
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.
S orting plastics and removing
contamination is labor intensive work.
A nd 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 the U.S.
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, a bout
70 percent end up in
a landfill or incinerator anyway.
It's too contaminated or it's
too difficult to separate.
A nd 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 m aterials or source
reduction, use less.
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 a 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 criti ques 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 U.S.
is turning plastic back into plastic
at a commercial scale yet, though
there's been many attempts.
Of the 37 chemical recycling
facilities proposed in the U.S.
since 2000, GAIA reports that only
three are operational, and they're
mostly turning plastic into fuel,
which the organization calls the
opposite of an eco-friendly solution.
The companies themselves though, beg
to differ, Brightmark, founded in
2016, is building a commercial-scale
plastics-to-fuel plant in Ashley,
Indiana, 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, t hey 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.
We 're targeted to half a processing
capacity sometime by 2023 of about
300,000 tonnes of end-of-life
plastics per year.
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.
We 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.
We have commitments to double the
recycling quotas in Europe from about
five million tonnes today per year to
10 million tonnes per year by 2025.
He also cites Europe's high
landfilling fees and multi-stream recycling
infrastructure as advantageous .
With plastic, glass and cardboard already
separated at the source, Plastic
Energy can acquire difficult to
recycle plastics more easily and
economically than in the U.S.
As the company tries to increase
its processing capacity by over 2,000
percent in the next three years,
i t may face competition from
Oregon-based Agilyx, which is also trying
to turn plastics back into
plastics and is looking
to expand internationally.
We have a pathway and a roadmap
to take plastic recycling from the current
10 percent to upwards of 90 percent.
Agilyx was one of the
earliest companies in this space.
Founded in 2004, it ran a
plastics-to-fuel operation until 2015, providing
jet fuel to the
Department of Defense.
Low oil prices forced the company to
pivot, and now Agilyx specializes in
converting polystyrene back into styrene, which
is used to make disposable
cups, takeout containers
and packing foam.
Agilyx is often hailed as a leader in
the space, but G AIA has called its
efficiency into question, reporting that only
one tenth of the waste that
Agilyx processed in 2018 was actually
turned into styrene, a figure that
the company disputes.
So yes, they were significantly
off on the yield numbers.
And if our yields were in the 10 to
20 percent range, we would not have an
economic plastic recycling pathway that
the top companies in polystyrene
have embraced. While GAIA says the
company has not proven that it's
capable of recycling plastic on a
commercial scale, Agilyx is planning to
expand its capacity across the U.S.,
Europe and Asia, in conjunction with
a number of petrochemical partners such
as Americas Styrenics and INEOS.
The facility in Chicago that we're
developing with INEOS Styrolution will
be 100 tons per day, ten times
the size of our Tigard, Oregon facility.
And as we replicate those, the scale
of our recycled styrene will begin to
have a significant impact
on the market.
Cooper says the company hasn't run a
life cycle analysis to see how its
recycled polystyrene compares to virgin
polystyrene, but estimates the
process to be between 40
to 70 percent cleaner.
This number too is up for debate.
But it's more than just
a disagreement over statistics .
Fundamentally, 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's 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 less 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.
Cooper's position is shared by industry
groups like the American Chemistry
Council and the Plastics Industry
Association, who 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, m aybe 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.
