CHEMICAL RECYCLING | ANALYSIS
recycled content targets will come into force. From tracking the chemical recycling industry via our quarterly updates, we know how long it can take to move from pilot and commercial demonstration scale to fully commercial operations, with full capacity usage achieved in steps and stages rather than going from low demonstration scale volumes to full capacity use. The packaging industry
and brand owners are painfully aware of the need for action – thus an open letter was sent from 31 industry associations across Europe to the European Commission in March 2023 calling for the adoption of unified rules to calculate recycled content produced from chemical recycling technologies. In doing so, support was expressed for the fuel-exempt model of mass balance accounting. In Germany in particular, industry associations have called upon the government to support chemical recycling, with the country lagging behind other nations in Europe where plans for the siting of chemical recycling facilities are concerned. During a Chemical Summit in late September of this year, the German government stated that it supports chemical recycling processes as an important complement to mechanical recycling “if they enable raw materials to be used efficiently”. Most recently, European
recycling association EURIC published its views on chemical recycling and mass balance in its September 2023 roadmap, emphasis-
www.plasticsrecyclingworld.com
ing the complementary role of chemical recycling alongside mechanical recycling, and opposing the use of mass balance accounting with a fuel exempt allocation method when superior recycling options are available – to be considered only “if no better recycling alternatives exist”.
Evolving field “Better recycling alterna- tives” – how are we to define “better” here? The tool commonly used to compare recycling and, in fact, end-of-life waste manage- ment alternatives, is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). A JRC Technical Report published this year set out to compare, in environmen- tal and economic terms, mechanical, physical, and chemical recycling as well as energy recovery of plastic waste. The study concluded that the choice of the preferred management option for plastic waste should be based on the criteria of environmental performance, technical feasibility, and economic feasibility. In its comparison of 27 waste management scenarios, it
reached the conclusion that recycling (mechanical, physical, and chemical) is preferable to energy recovery in all pathways analysed. For the investi- gated scenarios where mechanical and chemical recycling constitute alterna- tive management options, and here comes the surprise, a clear ranking could not be established. In fact, for the first time, a
LCA showed a case where a chemical recycling technol- ogy (partial glycolysis) performed nearly as well in carbon emissions terms as the mechanical recycling of PET bottles and trays. If substantiated, keeping in mind that LCA results always depend on choice of assumptions and param- eters, this shakes the frequently used argument of chemical recycling’s higher environmental footprint, at least for this specific depoly- merisation technology. Looking at economic
feasibility we need to take into consideration, as the JRC points out in its report, that physical and chemical recycling technologies are still very much under development, with costs
projected to decrease in the future. The report estimates that, by 2040, all chemical recycling technologies can reach positive net earnings – methanolysis in 2025, pyrolysis in 2033 and gasification by 2040 – con- ceding however that, due to insufficient data availability on economic parameters, there is a perceived need to update this analysis as technologies become more mature.
Hard-to-recycle plastic waste – even for chemical recycling?
Feedstock competition This leads, more or less directly, to the much-debat- ed issue of feedstock competition between mechanical and chemical recycling. Consensus has emerged in the industry that, in addition to available funding, the availability of sufficient feedstocks is a key limiting factor in the further development of the chemical recycling industry. Similarly, there is ac- knowledgement that input materials into chemical recycling processes need to be cleansed and sorted to achieve high quality outputs. It is thus surprising to still see new companies entering the market landscape with the claim that their technology does not require any sorting, drying, or pre-treatment of waste upstream (as recently observed during our quarterly updated research). Many new partnerships and collaborations for feedstock sourcing have emerged over the past year, with mixed waste sorting with the aim to recover waste plastics currently destined for landfill or incineration moving into the spotlight.
� October 2023 | PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD 17
IMAGE: D ELDRIDGE
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