Members of Greenpeace Indonesia display plastic waste from British multinational hygiene and food giant Unilever's products as part of their"Return to Sender" action in front of Unilever's office in Tangerang, a suburb of Jakarta, on June 20, 2024.It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first product I’d seen born of what’s being touted as a cure for a crisis.
While old-school, “mechanical” recycling yields plastic that’s degraded or contaminated, this type of “chemical” recycling promises plastic that behaves like it’s new, and could usher in what the industry casts as a green revolution: Not only would it save hard-to-recycle plastics like frozen food wrappers from the dumpster, but it would turn them into new products that can replace the old ones and be chemically recycled again and again.
It took interviews with a dozen academics, consultants, environmentalists and engineers to help me do just that.So began my long — and, well, circular — pursuit of the truth at a time when it really matters.to the wonders of chemical recycling. It’s also buying ads during cable news shows as U.S. states consider laws to limit plastic packaging and lobbying federal agencies to loosen the very definition of what it means to recycle.
Even in a real-life scenario, where bottles have labels and a little bit of juice left in them, most of the plastic products that go into the process find new life.It’s “very, very, very, very difficult” to break down plastic that way, said Steve Jenkins, vice president of chemicals consulting at Wood Mackenzie, an energy and resources analytics firm. “The laws of nature and the laws of physics are trying to stop you.
This means that if a pyrolysis operator started with 100 pounds of plastic waste, it can expect to end up with 15-20 pounds of reusable plastic. Experts told me the process can yield less if the plastic used is dirty or more if the technology is particularly advanced. So at the end of the day, nothing that comes out of pyrolysis physically contains more than 10% recycled material .a premium for sustainability
Propylene makes sturdy material such as butter tubs; ethylene makes flexible plastics like yogurt pouches. Many of the other chemicals aren’t used to make plastic — some get used to make rubber and paint or are used as fuel.But companies can do a number shuffle to assign all of the recycled value from the butter tubs to the yogurt pouches.
As long as you avoid double counting, Jenkins told me, you can attribute the full value of recycled naphtha to the products that will make the most money. Companies need that financial incentive to recoup the costs of pyrolysis, he said. If you think navigating the ins and outs of pyrolysis is hard, try getting your hands on actual plastic made through it.
In the end, I ran down half a dozen claims about products that came out of pyrolysis; each either existed in limited quantities or had its recycled-ness obscured with mass balance caveats. If I did get a tour, I wondered, would I even see all of that stubborn, dirty plastic they were supposedly recycling?
I asked ExxonMobil how much post-consumer plastic it was actually using. Catie Tuley, a media relations adviser, said it depends on what’s available. “At the end of the day, advanced recycling allows us to divert plastic waste from landfills and give new life to plastic waste.”
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