Chemical Recycling Aims To Scale Fast in Effort To Manage Plastic Waste, Even as Questions Remain
Megan Quinn | October 9, 2023 | Waste Dive
Chemical recycling is at a turning point in proving its financial viability and ability to scale to meet the demands of a changing plastics recycling industry.
Years ago, many of the technologies that make chemical recycling possible were still in the developmental stage, with companies focusing on getting their work out of the lab and into the real world.
But now companies such as Dow, Eastman, LyondellBasell, ExxonMobil, PureCycle, Cyclyx, and others are investing millions of dollars a year in scaling those technologies, saying the investments will speed up the process of keeping hard-to-recycle plastics out of landfills and funnel them into feedstocks for new products.
Chemical recycling, also called advanced recycling or molecular recycling by the plastics industry, is a broad term for numerous processing technologies that break down recovered plastics to the molecular level to become “building blocks” for new plastics or other products. Common techniques include pyrolysis, gasification and depolymerization.
Companies have poured millions of dollars into expanding capabilities in recent years, and they say those investments are finally paying off as they move on from small-scale experiments and open new facilities or ink offtake agreements. Mechanical recyclers and waste companies are also getting involved. Meanwhile, recently passed laws could make it easier to open facilities in certain states.
But some environmental and health experts say chemical recycling companies aren’t able to manage the volumes of material they claim, fueling an unsustainable reliance on plastic instead of taking steps to reduce or eliminate plastic use. They also worry the facilities create harmful health impacts.
Over the past year, Waste Dive has spoken with numerous waste and recycling experts, researchers, lawmakers, companies and other stakeholders to learn how chemical recycling will continue to affect the industry.
The fight over chemical recycling is playing out in almost every corner of the industry — from regulations and job creation to investments and commodity markets. Industry players say the next few years will determine just how embedded chemical recycling will become in the overall recycling landscape, and whether numerous companies’ scale-up plans will reach commercial scale significant enough to fulfill their promises.
A tale of scale
The fight comes as the plastic recycling rate has stagnated in the U.S., and lawmakers and local recyclers are pushing for more and better recycling infrastructure. At the same time, the public is putting more pressure on major brands to use more recycled content, prompting companies to make public recycled content goals they’ll need to meet by as early as 2025.
A coalition of major brands has called for access to up to 800,000 metric tons of chemically recycled plastics by 2030. The international community is also eyeing how chemical recycling could play a role in global plastic pollution management. The UN is working on an international legally binding agreement on plastic pollution, and treaty discussions have touched on how stakeholders see chemical recycling’s role either as a potent way to process plastic trash and as a “dangerous practice.”
Rather than position themselves as rivals to the existing recycling industry’s mechanical sortation and processing, chemical recyclers are selling themselves as an important partner in turbo-charging waste diversion and recycling. Chemical recycling can accept some lower-value mixed plastics mechanical recyclers aren’t interested in, they say. The processes can take in numerous colors of plastic — including colors that sometimes have limited markets, like black — and filter out the dyes as part of the process of breaking them down to the monomer level.
“If you look at the issue that we have in front of us, which is the challenge of plastic waste, it requires some really innovative solutions, but especially solutions that can give you scale because of the scale of the challenge,” said Manav Lahoti, Dow’s global sustainability director for Hydrocarbons and Business, in an interview late last year. “Mechanical recycling is an important component, but it doesn’t allow you to recycle these plastics at scale. That’s what advanced recycling does.”
Many major chemical recycling announcements in the past two years have focused on scale. That includes announcements of building new or bigger facilities, as well as announcing strategic partnerships and offtake agreements.
Paschalis Alexandridis, a professor at the University of Buffalo’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering who studies plastics recycling, says “scalable” is an important buzzword that defines the turning point of chemical recycling today. Numerous university researchers are working on chemical recycling technologies at the lab level and are looking to connect with companies to scale the findings into full-blown commercial solutions.
Millions of pounds of plastic produced each year, and just a small percentage of it recycled in the U.S., Alexandridis said during a presentation at the REMADE conference, an academic conference focusing on the circular economy, in March.
“Some people say the solution is to get rid of plastic or come up with some kind of magic chemistry — but each of those ‘solutions’ cannot handle [that many] pounds of plastic a year. There’s no way. As a result, we need many different approaches, and need them soon.”
Consumer and brand pressure, mixed with recently-passed recycled content laws in places like California, are big policy drivers that have created an environment for advanced recycling projects to really take off, said Haley Lowry, Dow’s global sustainability director for packaging and specialty plastics, in an interview late last year.
