Can we commercially manage plastics waste?

Since China refused to take any more UK waste for recycling in early January, the recycling debate has widened to focus on recycling plastic, packaging and other hard to recycle materials such as plastic coated paper coffee cups.

Plastics have only been around for 60 to 70 years and so this is a problem that has grown very quickly. As the UK continues to debate the issue and high profile organizations such as Starbucks experiment with behavioural activities that might change the way we view and use plastics, plastic and other hard to recycle waste continues to pile up, increasing the pressure for the UK to take some definitive action.

This week the BBC drew an interesting comparison between burning plastic and landfilling plastic. The case for both methods of dealing with plastic waste has pros and cons but it seems that the issue of capturing carbon emissions during the recycling process, and meeting the UK’s carbon reduction targets is key to both arguments.

As a stable material, plastic won’t emit carbon based gasses when landfilled on its own and essentially locks the carbon away. The United State’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reckon that a plastic bottle takes around 450 years to degrade; so this could be a cheap form of carbon capture. However, sizeable land banks are likely to be needed to deal with the amount of plastic we produce. Burning plastic via an incineration process permanently gets rid of the plastic and if the carbon emissions and heat can be captured, these by-products can also have value and be used to provide heat and power. Modern incenerators generally capture the carbon emissions but do encourage a destroy, rather than a recycle bahaviour.

An alternative plastic recycling process is plastic to oil (P2O) conversion. Often referred to as Pyrolysis the P2O process uses heat, in a controlled environment to recover low grade oil based products from the plastic. In February 2017, The Guardian published an article that stated the plastics-to-fuel sector was tipped to be worth $1.9bn by 2024. P2O equipment requires relatively low capital expenditure and the P2O process is being used in a number of countries to derive liquid products from un sorted plastics, creating a by-product, and therefore a plastic feedstock that has a commercial value. Could this value creation be what is needed to view plastics differently and encourage private sector investment into clean, commercial plastics recycling?