Plastic as fuel? Why ‘advanced’ recycling gets mixed reviews.
By Xander Peters | December 8, 2021 | The Christian Science Monitor
Baytown, Texas, is a city that stands in the shadow of the nation’s oil and gas industry. Located only 26 miles from Houston, it’s been home to an arm of the Gulf Coast petroleum corridor for more than a century. Look to the western horizon from Baytown’s east side in the evening and you’ll see a smear of orange, red, and yellow pastels blending into the Texas sunset, as it slips away behind the nation’s largest petroleum refinery.
The city is also among the key sites for the oil and gas industry’s next significant pivot.
ExxonMobil has already broken ground on an operational “advanced recycling” facility that it hopes to open next year. The operation is expected to be among the continent’s largest, with a capacity to recycle up to 30,000 metric tons of plastic waste annually. And it’s part of a petrochemical industry trend with global scope. ExxonMobil is building a similar facility in Notre Dame de Gravenchon, France, for example.
The idea is to expand heat-intensive recycling methods for materials that aren’t amenable to more traditional recycling.
This may sound like a win for the environment – a way to responsibly handle waste at a time when China is doing less of the world’s recycling than it used to. The industry’s expansion, however, is being met with skepticism by many recycling experts, who cite a lack of evidence demonstrating advanced recycling’s effectiveness.
“This a way for the petrochemical industry to sort of signal that they’re responding and being responsive to some of these concerns that the public is raising” about the plastics crisis, says Sarah Morath, an associate professor of environmental law and food law at Wake Forest University and the author of the forthcoming book, “Our Plastic Problem and How to Solve It.”
Yet she and other experts say advanced recycling is far from a simple and clear-cut solution.
Public concern about plastic
Prior to an industry rebrand in recent years, advanced recycling was referred to as chemical recycling, an energy-intensive process that uses heat or chemical reactions (or both) to recycle plastic waste into new plastic materials, fuel such as diesel and jet fuel, and other chemicals.
This method stands in contrast to a less-polluting process called mechanical recycling in which plastics are melted down but their complex molecules remain intact to be reused in new products. And many environmentalists say the best answer, for reducing humanity’s emissions and the waste that clogs roadsides and oceans, is to learn to use less plastic in the first place.
The expansion of advanced recycling comes at an important moment. The oil industry is exploring new business models as the world increasingly seeks to curb the use of fossil fuels due to climate change. Meanwhile, U.S. consumers are questioning their habits of heavy reliance on single-use plastics. A 2019 survey by PBS Newshour and Marist Poll found that roughly two-thirds of Americans – 66% – would pay at least 1% more for single-use daily items that are environmentally sound, as compared to single-use plastics, which break down into tiny particles and never truly degrade and disappear.
In fact, citizens globally are awakening to what many see as a plastics crisis, in large part spurred by data such as what researchers found in a 2018 study in the journal Science Advances: Of the more than 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic ever produced – single-use utensils, water bottles, grocery bags and more – 6.3 billion metric tons have been tossed aside as plastic waste. Only 9% of that waste has been recycled in plastic’s roughly 70-year history.