"Chemical Recycling" Could Handle Less Than 1.3% Of Us Plastics Even If All 11 Plants Were Operational

[hatrack]

The plastics and petrochemical industries’ latest purported solution to the plastic pollution crisis – chemical or “advanced” recycling – is essentially a public relations and marketing strategy designed to distract from the urgent need to curb plastic production, a new report contends. The report, released today by Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN), exposes the failures and perils of chemical recycling as an approach to manage plastic waste.

Only 11 chemical recycling facilities currently exist in the United States, and in total they are capable of processing less than 1.3 percent of all plastic waste generated annually, the report finds. The facilities do not operate at full capacity most of the time, however. Pervasive underperformance, hazardous working conditions, perpetuation of environmental racism, and financing challenges are among the many issues plaguing these operations, according to the report. “I think the [plastics] industry is relying on confusing people, starting with what is it, and what do you call it,” Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator, told DeSmog.

There is no legal definition of chemical recycling. The term generally describes industrial technologies that chemically process plastic waste, melting or boiling it down into gasses, chemicals, or fuels. The process is extremely energy intensive and inevitably generates toxic byproducts. While industry associations like the American Chemistry Council and America’s Plastic Makers now refer to it as “advanced recycling,” Enck said it is neither advanced nor recycling. “What we’re finding is very little new plastic is actually created,” she said.

Instead, many of the technologies use methods like gasification and pyrolysis to convert plastic into fuel. Pyrolysis is the process of heating a certain substance without oxygen, in this case to chemically break down plastics into their component parts so they can be made into other chemical substances or into fuels. Such a conversion is not recycling, according to internationally accepted definitions, the report notes.

EDIT

https://www.desmog.com/2023/10/31/chemical-recylcing-report-false-solution-plastics-crisis-beyond-plastics/

[NNadir]

1. Even if we banned plastics, which we will not do despite any amount of rhetoric and armchair handwaving...

...we still have legacy plastics, many in micro or nano form distributed throughout the environment, on land, in bodies of water, and indeed, increasingly, in the air.

We cannot magically wave our hands and make the masses of these legacy plastics go away because "Beyond Plastics" says they're bad.

Ms. (or Dr.?) Enck means well I'm sure, but looking at her resume at Bennington College I see no reference of any kind to any kind of technical training that would allow her to make the statements made in the OP about what does and does not work.

There are many thousands of scientific papers written each year on issues like pyrolysis, and/or, issues like steam reforming and/or dry reforming. Having read thousands myself over the years, I believe that many have merit and are worthy of pursuit.

The key to the issue is energy, and no, the fact that, according to her bio on the "Beyond Plastics" website stating...

Judith lives in upstate New York with her husband, where they built their passive solar home with their own hands and with lots of support from friends and family. She designed her town’s rural recycling program. She is a proud parent and enjoys reading and following the news in her spare time...

...a bourgeois passive solar home will not provide that energy.

Some of us spend "our spare time" being serious about a dire reality, reading deeply on a highly technical level, whereas others simply want to criticize work about which they clearly know next to nothing.

Plastic recycling, in particular recycling as specific plastics, i.e. PET to PET, or PE to PE, is a failure but carbon recycling need not be, assuming that clean heat energy can be built without catcalls, appeals to fear and ignorance. As for toxicology, if Ms. (or Dr.?) Enck were to open a science book, she might understand that leaving legacy plastics in place because she's decided without any training what will and will not work, is not a solution that addresses the very real issues of plastic toxicology. In order to address toxicology, the chemical bonds of the toxins must be broken. Her "it won't work" declaration is simply kicking the problem down the road, irresponsibly, lazily, and without any practical insight.

Selective attention is always dishonest; at times it his inherently dangerous. Environmental issues must be addressed in terms of combinatorial optimization, where the risks are weighted and counterbalanced against one another.

Matrix flows at high temperatures are, in my view at least, the answer to cleaning our poisoned environmental matrices, air, water and land. This is not a simple answer, not a cheap answer, not a slick answer, and not an answer that will involve minimal effort but holing up in bourgeois settings and issuing declarative fiats unsupported by evidence is decidedly not an answer at all.

Of course, using fossil fuels to provide this heat should be a nonstarter, but we can make clean heat, but only if we set uninformed handwaving aside.

Have a nice weekend.