Jeremy DeBenedictis, President of Alterra Energy, stands in the storage area of shredded plastics his company receives from recycling facilities in their facility in Akron, Ohio, on Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022. “Our mission is to solve plastic pollution,” said DeBenedictis, company president. “That is not just a tag line. We all truly want to solve plastic pollution.”
ExxonMobil, New Hope Energy, Nexus Circular, Eastman, Encina and other companies are planning to build large plastics recycling plants. Seven smaller facilities across the United States already recycle plastic into new plastic, according to the ACC. A handful of others convert hard-to-recycle used plastics into alternative transportation fuels for aviation, marine and auto uses.
So what is more likely to happen than actual recycling, said Enck, a former regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is the industry will shift to burning plastics as waste or as fuel. Two groups working to reduce plastic pollution, the Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics, estimated that the U.S. rate for recycling plastic waste in 2021 was even lower — 5% to 6%, after China stopped accepting other countries’ waste in 2018.
The Ohio facility typically takes in 40 tons to 50 tons per day, heating and liquifying the plastic to turn it back into an oil or hydrocarbon liquid, about 10,000 gallons to 12,000 gallons daily. About 75% of what comes into the facility can be liquified like that. Another 15% is turned into a synthetic natural gas to heat the process, while the remainder — paper, metals, dyes, inks and colorants — exit the reactor as a byproduct, or carbon char, DeBenedictis said.
DeBenedictis said he’s licensing the technology to try to grow the industry because that’s the “best way to make the quickest impact to the world.” A Finnish oil and gas company, Neste, is currently working to commercialize Alterra’s technology in Europe.
Absolutely 👌🏽💯
Advanced recycling? At what point do we force companies to stop packaging so much stuff in plastic?
Uh no. Stopping the use of single use plastic is the solution.
Recycling is always great but reducing use is even better. We need to ban single use plastics like water bottles and bags
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