The recycling myth: A plastic waste solution littered with failure

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Plastics makers are touting ‘advanced recycling’ as the solution to the world’s waste crisis. So far, this technology hasn't lived up to the lofty claims of its backers, specialreports learns

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Not only is this garbage choking landfills and despoiling oceans, it’s contributing to global warming because it’s made from fossil fuels. At a time when demand for transport fuel is under pressure from government vehicle-efficiency mandates and the rise of electric cars, the oil industry is doubling down on plastics.

As of July, 14 U.S. states had passed these kinds of laws. At least $500 million in public funds has been spent since 2017 on 51 U.S. advanced recycling projects, the environmental group Greenpeace said in a report last year. Boise’s government, for example, has spent at least $736,000 on garbage bags for its program, according to purchase orders and invoices between May 2018 and April 2020 obtained by Reuters through public records requests.

However, the Reuters review found some advanced recycling companies struggling with the same obstacles that have bedeviled traditional recyclers for decades: the expense of collecting, sorting and cleaning plastic trash, and creating end products that can compete on price and quality with fossil fuels or virgin plastic.

A narrower analysis, looking just at the final recycling process and its contribution to global warming, found that pyrolysis scored better than landfilling but was worse than burning plastic in a cement kiln. Pyrolysis has been tried before on plastic. British oil giant BP Plc, German chemical maker BASF SE and U.S. oil company Texaco Inc – now owned by Chevron Corp – all separately dropped plans to scale up waste-to-fuel pyrolysis technologies more than 20 years ago due to technical and commercial problems.

A numerical symbol that commonly appears on plastic packaging to identify the resin out of which the product is made Of two-dozen companies whose projects were reviewed by Reuters, three have gone public in the last year: PureCycle Technologies Inc, Agilyx AS and Pryme B.V. The market value of all has declined since their debuts.

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