Recycling Is The Way

So is reducing consumption and reuse

Hey There,

This took me a bit to write and refine. I intended to publish it last week, but I thought it wasn’t ready so I held it back. I hope you find this accessible and interesting. If you are interested in something purely technical then just go read this recent paper in ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering by Jean-Paul Lange (yeah, he works at Shell). The EPA has come out with a National Recycling Strategy and getting this plan implemented is important as I describe below. Thanks for reading and please subscribe!

Recycling Is The Way

I keep returning to recycled plastics every few months. It’s a topic that gets a lot of attention, but no one who writes about it for major publications seems to offer up any sort of path forward. The story is always about how XX industry lied to the people and how recycling is “a scam.” Recycling is really the only viable option available and Europe is starting to make it work, but we need to think of it as a dynamic marketplace where there are both buyers (demand) and sellers (supply).

I last wrote about some of the barriers to recycling in July. In reading and talking to people working on new materials I still believe that if we want to make an immediate and meaningful change to plastic waste then increasing recycling rates and building out infrastructure is the shortest path to achieving reductions in plastic waste.

When I think about timelines around strategies to end plastic waste I think it’s helpful to think of things in a pyramid where the top is the most difficult and the bottom is the easiest:

1. Completely new materials that will displace current plastics is far away—at best 10+ years out to hitting meaningful scale in everyday consumer applications unless we actually run out of oil in the next 10 years.

2. Chemical recycling is a nascent and growing area that is exciting but the economics of it need to get figured out first.

3. Mechanical recycling is our current approach with the largest amount of existing capacity and is immediate and “off the shelf” solutions

4. Investing in infrastructure or founding of reverse logistics companies that enhance the purity of recovered feed stocks

5. Policy to drive use of recycled plastics in consumer applications and expand material recovery

If we think backwards about how our plastics get made they come from a finite set of operations such as crude oil refining and steam cracking. Moving down the supply chain the materials become more dispersed as they make their way to different end markets. As these materials make their way to the consumer, let’s use the US as an example, that’s roughly 200 million people that need to make decisions on how their waste gets sorted. For most, everything is going to a landfill because there are no other options due to local government policy. I keep getting drawn back to this story in the New York Times about city people moving to rural Vermont in 2020:

Despite this clear warning, this summer’s population explosion has tried his last nerve, as he explained to one flatlander after another how things are done in Vermont. Yes, the dump attendant, a heavily bearded man named Jody, carries a firearm. And no, you cannot mix your magazines with your cans and bottles.

For most curbside recycling operations in the US we are able to simply put our mixed recycling on the curb, it gets put into a big truck, and we don’t think about it anymore. In a small town it’s not so easy and sorting of recyclables often happens at the town “dump,” by the consumers. Aluminum. Paper. Plastics. Landfill.

Ideally, with plastics they would then further get sorted based on what type of plastic and then what color. In really remote places or islands the next biggest issue is figuring out how to get your recyclables out of your town and to a material recovery facility. Sometimes, you just end up with a literal boatload of polypropylene yogurt cups that no one wants as one reader told me about their issues in a small town in Alaska over a year ago:

We always look for something better. One better thing would be a way for a small local business to use trash as feedstock for something usable. So, yes, that's one area of interest. Up the road in Whitehorse (Yukon Territory, Canada), which is a much larger town, they tried a plastic-to-oil pilot project which I'm told was somewhat successful except that they couldn't get a well-sorted feedstock and gave it up. Energy costs are a problem in rural Alaska; oil would be nice. They used a machine from a Japanese manufacturer called Blest.

Problem: it's really hard to get reliable information on this topic. Likewise, incineration/cogeneration might be of interest and has the same issues of scale and of reliable information. Your blog provides an interesting view of the world and is a reminder of the complex industrialization that serves as the backdrop to our lives. Meanwhile, here, day-to-day, there are these mundane concerns - what to do with all those #5 yogurt containers? And OMG, all that styrofoam! And so many old fishnets!I hardly think plastic trash is the focus of your professional life. But the person who comes up with a small scale, local way of dealing with some of this stuff will be a hero. Perhaps if you run across information along those lines you might share it on your blog?

In thinking about any recycling operation either mechanical or chemical things ultimately come back to material recovery. Higher purity on incoming materials means better outcomes for mechanical recycling and chemical recycling. If we have high purity plastic materials at recovery facilities, much in the way that aluminum and glass do then mechanical becomes easier, higher yielding, and the supply side of the equation improves.

On the demand side of the equation there are two ways of creating demand for recycled plastics. The first is letting the free market do it’s thing, this is what the US is doing, and the impetus is on companies such as PepsiCo, Danone, and Patagonia creating products with recycled plastic and selling it to consumers. The problem with this strategy is that it’s 100% on the companies to figure it out technically and market it to their consumers. The majority of consumers do not care about recycled plastics being used and thus the demand is capped to the people who do care.

The second demand side strategy would be to enact public policy that requires recycled plastic to be used in current consumer grade plastics. This is the policy of Europe with the goal that packaging should contain 25% recycled plastic and 30% by 2030. Demand for recycled PET has been stellar over the last few months in Europe because a lot of that demand is created by public policy. A similar policy has been promoted by the American Chemistry Council.

Here in the US we do not have the right infrastructure necessary to collect all of the plastic waste that we generate and we are likely behind places like Europe and even some of the manufacturing capacity of Asia. In the US things come back to lack of purity on collected materials which hinder every downstream process during recycling.

More collection facilities such as bottle returns would allow for consumers to regain their deposits (I know, it’s small), but it would allow for higher purity feed stocks which could even be sold to places like Europe where demand is high for recycled PET. I suspect that if we had a demand for recycled plastic here in the US someone would figure out the collection and get rich.

Due to a lack of federal policy when it comes to plastic recycling in the US it is then up to the States and local governments to lead the way on public policy. California is a leader on many of these issues, especially when it comes to requiring recycled plastic. Cheryl Hogue from C&EN reported on the story back in July:

A new California law requires at least 65% of single-use plastic packaging and plastic food ware, such as plates and utensils, sold or distributed in the state be recycled by 2032.

California also recently passed a law in the state legislature requiring 30% recycled content in thermoformed applications by 2030. A policy like this would help fix the demand side of the recycled plastic equation here ihe US. I think creating a strong demand, even if it's 100% government mandated, would be a good start to getting our plastic material recovery figured out. I suspect that even the producers of the plastics would be happy to start investing in the infrastructure too if there was the right public policy in place.

Over the last 20 years these attempts in new materials and advanced recycling have largely failed in the US and Europe. Eastman was doing methanolysis of PET in the 1990s. Glycolysis of PET (cooking it in ethylene glycol, filtering out impurities, and stripping excess ethylene glycol) works provided that the incoming raw material is of sufficiently high purity. A new biomanufactured material that is going to replace PET or HDPE? I won’t take that bet just yet, but maybe for LDPE there is market?

Companies like Revalyu in India are making this process work because there is sufficient raw material availability and demand. Local production in SE Asia of consumer apparel that must use recycled content in the textiles is a huge customer of Revalyu. Brands such as North Face or Patagonia or Nike want more recycled materials in their products, granted they don’t produce their own products, but the contract manufacturing factories need to source recycled materials from a supplier and these materials can often command the premium pricing required to sell them. Mechanical recycling and chemical recycling both have parts to play in creating recycled raw materials that are ready to be used.

When it comes to dealing with plastic waste I think we need more investment, but a central unified public policy initiative that requires recycled plastics is the first step and it would be the foundation for investment into better collection, better automated sorting, more mechanical recycling capacity, more chemical recycling capacity, and all of these things would set the stage for bringing new materials to market.

Further, I don’t think bans on single use plastics will solve the problem either. Moving away from single use plastics to polymer coated paper (sometimes this paper even has PFAS containing coatings) is trading one problem for another. Recycling coated paper is not the same as recycling newspapers and once again complexity makes the issue of recycling more difficult. A takeout food container made out of PET/PP/HDPE can be reused MULTIPLE times before disposal and black containers often go straight to the landfill due to inability to be sorted. My own town of Arlington, Massachusetts asks that we do not try to recycle black plastic take out containers:

The reason we say no to black plastic is because recycling facilities sort plastics by bouncing a beam of light off them. Since black plastic absorbs light, it can't be sorted and goes straight through the system and off to landfill or incineration.

Most current (and past) black plastic use carbon to make the black, which absorbs the beam so the reader can’t identify the resin.

Instead of banning single use plastics I’d rather see policy that bans making materials difficult to sort and recycle.

Dealing with our waste is complicated and we don’t like to think about it. In the United States a large portion of the population over consumes because it’s just really easy. Dealing with the aftermath of our consumption is someone else’s problem. Unless you live in a small town in Vermont and then you are facing Jody who carries a firearm. You better have your bottles sorted.

Tony

Hey, you made it to the end. Here is a cool video from Patagonia talking about how they use rPET to make their clothing.