Chemical recycling is not the answer to plastic pollution

And some other things I came across.

Can we just find alternatives, start using/consuming less over all and start cleaning up the mess we’ve created? I get frustrated with all these “we found the solution to plastic pollution” headlines. No, you haven’t. Period! So far there hasn’t been one simple solution that doesn’t pose risks and create a lot of other problems. What we need is the kind of problem solving that got us here in the first place. Billiard balls used to be made of ivory, but when this was no longer an option a replacement material was needed. In comes plastic and it’s taken the world by storm.

How about we find other alternatives or go back to materials we used to use or at least stop lying to people about what’s in their plastic containers, their clothes, their food wrappers, the insides of aluminum cans, about what lines their paper cups etc. That’d be a start.

Don’t get me wrong there are many great initiatives worldwide and I’ve talked about some of them. We just won’t get around reduce, reuse, recycle if we want to get a handle on things.

I’m gonna start with a story that caught my eye this week on X-Twitter. It’s to do with ocean plastic waste and it lists the countries that are the major contributors to it. Now, before people start pointing fingers. Let me quickly say something about how this is possible. A quick internet search tells you that mismanagement of waste is a huge factor in the Philippines and also that there is a weird (weird to me at least) culture of buying everything in small plastic packages. Apparently, it is much cheaper to buy it this way than for instance bigger plastic bottles. If you’re living in poverty, it’s not a choice. It’s what is available at a price that’s affordable for you. Of course somebody else is making a ton of money off of this – otherwise it wouldn’t be happening.

Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic-waste-pollution-by-country/

Just a few more numbers here. The Philippines have 4,820 rivers that are emitting plastic into the ocean. Let that number sink it. And yes, that is 356,371 tons every single year. And yes, that’s more than double what the rest of the world contributes (rest of the world minus the other countries that are mentioned).

Those numbers are insane to me. How is this even possible? I mean even if the Filipinos are collecting their garbage and plastic waste and doing everything they can to prevent it from ending up in a river, it gets dumped just anywhere. Granted there are people looking into this and trying to help, but holy *you-know-what* that’s a massive amount of plastic.

If we keep producing the same or even greater amounts of plastic any clean-up effort is basically useless. I don’t mean we should stop cleaning up the mess we’ve created. It would just be easier if we didn’t keep producing more and more.

Frustrating!

I’m really frustrated with myself because I have been using more plastic since I started my new job. It’s almost impossible to grab lunch, snacks, soft drinks or anything basically during the day that’s not wrapped in plastic. Yes, I could cook something the night before, take it to work and heat it in the microwave, but realistically that’s not going to work. And that’s just food. Imagine if you had no other choice in so many more areas of your life. We need to do better for everyone.

Picture credit: Killari Hotaru Unsplash

Now to today’s topic – chemical recycling

You know my position on recycling and plastic. Yes, sure, why not, but don’t pretend it’s a way out. With only nine percent of plastics being recycled and only 21 percent of plastics even suitable for recycling it’s clearly not the answer.

So, what is chemical recycling? I mean we’ve talked about mechanical recycling where old PET beverage bottles become new ones; where materials are reused in a different way than their original function; we’ve talked about plastics used as feedstock and we did touch on chemical recycling at some point but not delve deeper.

Chemical recycling breaks the links between monomers (remember monomers form polymers). So far so useful. What is needed for this though? Plastic is washed, shredded and transported (similar to mechanical recycling), then melted down. Now comes the fun bit, it is heated to extreme temperatures, becomes a gas that then condenses into an oil-like liquid and is distilled into fractions (paraphrased from this article). Sounds interesting, right?

Well, there’s too many buts here and I got frustrated reading through all those articles. How can there be a headline on how chemical recycling is the solution if it so very much isn’t? Before I forget, there are several types of chemical recycling technologies. The main ones are pyrolysis and gasification. I scanned a report that I have put in the notes that talks about circular economy and plastic recycling. One of their findings was that there isn’t enough data available yet. The processes are not yet clear and the environmental impact isn’t either.

Let’s have a quick look at what the IPEN (International Pollutants Elimination Network) says on the subject.

The analysis concluded that chemical recycling is “a dangerous deception” to solving the plastic waste problem as it is “inefficient, energy-intensive and contributes to climate change.” Even at full capacity, the report noted, the 11 chemical recycling facilities in the U.S. would handle less than 1.3% of the plastic waste generated annually within the country (Source: EHN Report)

And they are hailing this as the new solution to the plastic waste problem? Do they still teach math in school? That’s not even a start and if you look at what’s needed to have those chemical recycling facilities up and running. Yikes!

The article continues with:

You are using fossil fuel energy to heat and melt these plastics and depolymerize them and then you are creating a petrochemical-based fuel at the end of the process […] It is an incredibly inefficient and polluting process and it becomes a petrochemical Merry-Go-Round (Lee Bell, mercury and persistent organic pollutants policy advisor at IPEN)

I don’t know about you guys, but I remain unconvinced reading this. And I have no answer as to how we can make it out of this mess. Other than support countries where mismanagement of waste has become a huge problem such as the Philippines and to do our best to consume and use less in general.

Oh, and not to believe in a easy way out or a headline that sounds too good to be true. Plastics are here to stay. They were made to endure. We need to find a way to live with them in a way that won’t kill us.

I just published the podcast on Callin. Click here if you want to listen to all this information.

Notes

Chemical recycling “a dangerous deception” for solving plastic pollution: Report

The world's first 'infinite' plastic

Our planet is choking on plastic

https://www.unep.org/interactives/beat-plastic-pollution/?gad_source=1

Recycling technologies

CHEMICAL RECYCLING OF PLASTICS

Which Countries Pollute the Most Ocean Plastic Waste?

How Did the Philippines Become the World’s Biggest Ocean Plastic Polluter?