A lot of old plastic is wasted
Plastic waste washing up on pristine coastlines from Antarctica to the Arctic, as well as giant floating islands of plastic waste in the Pacific, has received widespread media coverage and contributed to a shift in consumer awareness.
Research shows that most waste plastic is sent to landfills and incinerated, where the material is lost forever as a resource. Only 16% of plastic waste is currently reprocessed to make new plastic; "leakage" into the ocean is mainly caused by poor landfill management or a complete lack of waste treatment systems.
Plastic recycling will be an emerging growth industry in the chemical industry in the future
With more than one-third of the chemicals industry's sales made up of petrochemicals and plastics production and plastic-related products, we believe the chemicals industry plays a central role in solving the many challenges of plastic waste. At the same time, we also realize that the enterprise is a profit economy, and the chemical industry has the opportunity to establish a new and profitable industry branch based on recycled plastics.
Three ways to reuse plastic
There are three main methods of reusing plastics: mechanical recycling, chemical recycling and processing plastic waste back to basic raw materials.
Mechanical recycling physically processes used plastic back into resin pellets, leaving the polymer chains intact. The recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and high-density polyethylene has become a viable business, but there is still room for further process optimization. A key challenge is finding how to maintain the performance quality of the resin through the recycling step and avoid the degradation that currently occurs.
Chemical recycling, also known as monomer recycling, breaks waste plastic back into its monomers through a chemical process. This approach only works for condensation-type polymers that can be remonomerized, such as polyesters (particularly PET) and polyamides, but this still represents a considerable amount and there is considerable room for process improvement.
Processing back into raw materials requires catalytic or thermal treatment to break down the polymer chains into hydrocarbon fractions. Some technologies are under development. Of these, pyrolysis may have the greatest potential, as it should be able to treat a variety of low-quality mixed plastic waste streams. This is particularly useful when dealing with flexible packaging, which is a major part of the waste stream and cannot be handled well by today’s mechanical recycling processes.
Strengthening the waste plastic management chain
By 2055, the annual global profit pool from scrap plastics could be as high as $203 billion.
Due to low recycling rates of used plastics, raw material shortages have limited their growth and weakened interest in their further development and investment; this situation is now slowly improving. The waste management industry that collects plastic waste and processes it initially has its own set of challenges, not least the lack of economies of scale: in developed economies, the industry is often very costly due to its small scale and lack of efficient collection and sorting processes. ,Applications of automation have so far been limited. In emerging economies, plastic waste is often processed through informal systems—individual workers sort through dumps and sort by hand at collection points and landfills—which represents a processing structure that is not easily scalable.
In our view, the chemical industry at least has an important role to play in supporting plastic waste management. In industries such as aluminum and paper, recycling has become part of the industry structure, and producers have played an important role in setting up recycling, including investing in and owning recycling infrastructure.
There is room for chemical companies to think boldly about the possibility of significantly increasing the flow of plastic waste ready for reuse. Where pyrolysis technology matures and offers low-cost economics in large-scale plants, it is possible to imagine a new type of fully integrated plant configuration capable of accepting scrap plastics and conventional feedstocks. This will greatly improve the industry competitiveness of chemical companies.