Annotated: Plastics Followup, Recycling

This post is a part of a series that forms an annotated reading list; all posts in the series can be found here.

Today, I read The incredible new tech that can recycle all plastics, forever by Graham Lawton on New Scientist (Apple News Link).

I had this article on my list when I read and commented on the article yesterday, so it felt like a valid connection to make in my personal reading journey. I complained about plastics use generally, so why not offer something of a sliver of hope as a counterpoint.

Hopefully, I soon won’t have to waste any more of my precious time triaging this type of waste. A suite of “advanced recycling” technologies is gradually coming on stream, promising to take used plastic of any type and convert it into something extremely useful: plastic. The goal is to create a circular economy for this material where there is no longer any need to make virgin plastic from crude oil, just endlessly recycle what we already have. Plastic, rightly demonised as a scourge of the modern world, could be fantastic again.

Literally the problem I am actively dealing with myself and one of my points yesterday was around the confusion of separating the various types of plastic and not knowing where it will actually end up. This article does a great job of identifying that idea through a scientific lens.

Up to now, efforts to clean up our act have barely scratched the surface. “Plastics recycling has been an abysmal failure,” says Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, a non-profit group based in Bennington, Vermont, that aims to end plastic pollution. The recycling technologies that do exist are rudimentary and laborious. Plastic waste is sorted into different types, sometimes by hand, and the best of it is sent for mechanical recycling. That involves washing, shredding or grinding, melting and extruding or compacting the plastic into pellets that can be melted down and used again.

A really interesting point about plastics that most people I assume don't know is just how manual a process recycling is, which is the reason why current techniques are unable to keep up with the volume.

In principle, advanced recycling can do much better because it works not mechanically, but chemically. At its best, it can take bundles of dirty, mixed plastic waste and transform them into pure chemicals indistinguishable from those extracted from crude oil. These can then be remade into plastic that is chemically and physically identical to the virgin version, or used as other industrial chemicals. And once they reach the end of their short afterlife, they can be recycled again. “Plastic can go back to virgin over and over and over again,” says Bill Cooper at Cyclyx International, a plastics recycling technology company in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

This would be ideal but will be hard fought. The article goes into both the science of a few different technologies and the pitfalls of these technologies coming in at a late stage in this process where we have literal tons of plastics being discarded daily.

Key Takeaways:

• Technologies (pyrolysis, gasification, and solvolysis) exist to make this a potential reality.
• These technologies still have drawbacks and pitfalls (energy hungry, purification for reuse, production of toxic waste, unable to keep up with waste volumes, and a general lack of public trust) and it will take a lot to override these.

The pushback is in full flow, with organisations such as Beyond Plastics stepping up their campaigns. According to Enck, the group’s president, advanced recycling is merely a “lobbying and marketing tactic by the petrochemicals industry” to continue business as usual. Nonsense, says Krause. The campaigners’ goal is for plastic to be phased out altogether, but that isn’t going to happen. The genie is out of the plastic bottle.

I did say at the beginning that this would offer a sliver of hope; I actually meant just a sliver.