When oil and gas companies first launched their campaign to promote recycling to the American public, they pitched the process as a viable and sustainable solution to the plastic pollution problem. More than three decades later, however, the vast majority of plastic waste still ends up incinerated or dumped, less than one-tenth is recycled, and microplastics have been found virtually everywhere on Earth, including the human bloodstream.
The petrochemical industry is now pivoting to another solution: “advanced” recycling. The term, also known as chemical recycling, is used to describe a variety of approaches that can supposedly turn even the most hard-to-recycle plastics into “sustainable” fuels or oils and chemicals that can be used in new plastic production.
But a new, 159-page report, released today by Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN, casts serious doubt on the technology’s ability to make even a modest dent on the world’s growing plastic burden. In the most comprehensive report on chemical recycling facilities in the U.S. to date, researchers looked at the operations of 11 companies across the country to examine the plastic industry’s claim that chemical recycling can significantly help reduce global plastic pollution.
“The science and data currently available do not support this claim and actually point to the conclusion that chemical recycling would support expansion of plastic production, while potentially causing unacceptable levels of environmental and social harm — as well as impacts on human health — through emissions, waste generation, energy consumption, and contaminated outputs,” the report’s authors write.
Researchers found that, collectively, the 11 facilities have the stated ability to process less than 1.3 percent of America’s annual plastic waste. Additionally, it was unclear if many of the facilities were even operating at their maximum stated capacity.
“There’s an enormous amount of industry-driven hype around chemical recycling and the main reason for that is they don’t want to see legislation at the state or federal level that restricts the production of plastic,” said Lee Bell, policy adviser to IPEN, a network of more than 600 nongovernmental organizations in over 125 countries. “It’s widely agreed that the only way to reduce plastic pollution in a substantive way is to cut production of plastic itself.”
“What data we do have raises red flags about this technology,” said Bell. “If we were to see wide-scale scale-up and build-out, we could foresee very, very significant emission impacts and very little to show for it in terms of recycled plastic production.”
Read the full story in The Intercept.