INSIGHT: Chems recycling innovation continues apace, but time pressures grow

LONDON (ICIS)–Technology for chemicals recycling and other methods for utilising waste products as feedstocks continue to go from strength to strenghth, with nearly every week bringing news of a fresh innovation.

Last week, INEOS Styrolution announced that it had managed to produce virgin polystyrene (PS) using recycled styrene monomer feedstocks, a milestone that sets one of the world’s largest producers of the material on the road to circular production.

The question is how long that road will be, and whether it is a runway or an autobahn.

Though a world first for INEOS Styrolution, the process remains at the laboratory scale at present.

As with many of the flurry of new technologies under development, the company has expressed hopes of scaling up the technology, but it is a long way from the laboratory to a commercial-scale PS production complex, and timeframes envisaged by regulators to forge a truly circular economy are not forgiving.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES
In recent years, concerns over microplastics in water bottles and China’s move to ban waste plastic imports built on longstanding public unease about ocean waste, creating a tipping point for regulators, with ambitious targets either mooted or agreed across the EU and individual member states for the next decade.

Unlike in earlier discussions on plastic waste, the petrochemicals industry and regulators are largely singing from the same hymn sheet on the need to utilise waste streams as a raw material and reduce the environmental impact of consumer goods.

“It is critical to address the plastic waste in the environment,” said James Seward, chairman of the World Plastics Council (WPC) and a vice president at LyondellBasell.

“Left on its own, total plastics production in the world will double, and … leaving aside economics, we have to find the solution to that. I think that, if we don’t, then society will simply legislate against plastics in a blunt way.”

The pace of innovation is increasing. Executives speaking at the IdentiPlast conference in London last month estimated that the new technologies under development in laboratories and research centres across the globe will have matured within the next five to 10 years.

The question is how long these technologies take to roll out across the industry and what that means to regulatory targets, particularly in Europe.

“[I see] five to 10 years before we’re ready to cookie-cutter the model, but then to build plants at scale through that process is going to take five to 10 years on top of that,” said Stuart Hayward-Higham, director of technical developments at waste treatment firm Suez, which is also a member of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW).

“By my calculations, that suggests that we’ll miss 2020, 2025, and might catch the back end of 2030 for some of this [technology], so the question is how we do that transition [to a circular economy in the current timeframe],” he added.

The EU has proposed binding targets of 25% recycled plastic content in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) by 2025, while the UK has proposed a mandate that plastics packaging with less than 30% recycled content be taxed by 2022.

“We are five to 10 years from getting virgin standard [PET] … We need to start thinking in a non-linear way,” said PLASgran’s managing director Mark Roberts last month, who called the technology “embryonic” at present.

There is also the matter of educating end users and consumers about the present limitations of recycled plastics compared to virgin, down to the nuts and bolts level of sourcing sufficient recycled material to meet orders from large retailers and what to do if those orders increase.

“We can make a product out of that material, but if that is successful, how do I convince the supplier to make more scrap? We’ve got to think about where we’re getting material from,” Roberts added.

INDUSTRY, LEGISLATION, INFRASTRUCTURE
Part of the challenge is how fragmented the recycling sector has traditionally been. Collection infrastructure remains localised across much of Europe, with the level of technology and specifics of regulation differing from local authority to local authority.

The EU executive body, the European Commission, has been working to align targets and commitments on the supply and demand side of the market, with producers so far pledging to place 10m tonnes of recycled material on the market by 2025.

So far, however, buyers have only pledged to purchase 6.4m tonnes/year.

Aside from volumes, the quality of the material collected and produced needs to be high enough for buyers, and part of that is based on standardisation and policy, according to INEOS’ director Tom Crotty.

“Say we’re going to convert our cracker line at Grangemouth [UK] to take waste plastic feedstock,” he said, speaking to ICIS last month.

“That’s going to be a several hundred investment, and w’ere going to need a million tonnes of waste material. Where’s the million tonnes?”

“That’s where the government has to step up to the plate, and that’s why I call them out about how waste collection systems are so dispersed and disparate in the UK.”

STANDARDS
“At the moment there are no real consistent standards in terms of consumer plastic waste collection and sorting,” LyondellBasell’s Seward said, noting that trade restrictions also made little sense in light of the scale of the task ahead.

“At the moment, what you have are extremely low circularity rates in eastern Europe; Russia is essentially landfilling everything,” he added.

“If you want to develop technology in, say, Germany, that is scalable, it is crazy to deny access to what would be a feedstock stream.”

The extent of the step change across the system required means that it is not surprising that current infrastructure is not fit for purpose but, with governmental timelines as tight as they are, it remains to be seen what impact future roadblocks have on the pace of development.

“It is not surprising that current systems and processes can’t cope. I think there is going to be a bit of catching up to do, and we need to accept that there is a little bit of learning as we go along, and there will be iteration loops.”

“My hope is [that] when you have a production process, and hit bottlenecks, that we maintain strong enough collaboration between different sectors, that we will be able to talk in a logical way about solving those issues … It would be surprising to me if it would be smooth as we went through this ramp-up.”

The issue also remains that some material, such as certain multi-layered plastics, may never work as recyclable material or feedstocks, and packaging companies are constantly coming up with new blends and forms that will present fresh challenges to recyclers.

This means that, to truly soak up all plastic waste in a country, it may be necessary to create or scale up payment systems, both to increase collection rates and shift consumer perception of materials as something other than junk.

“I think putting value on plastic is such an important concept, and that comes back to the idea of economic sustainability … You can’t mechanically recycle everything,” Seward said.

“The big [issue] at the moment is waste collection, and I really believe if we could address that through infrastructure, and that means industry working together with civil governments working with city councils, that is the missing link.”

TARGETS AND SCRUTINY
While it remains uncertain whether governments and industry will have solved all the issues necessary by the end of the next decade, the focus on solving this issue means that it seems likely that something approaching a truly circular economy will develop in the next decade or two.

However, in the meantime, producers are likely to find themselves under increasing scrutiny, and the danger of more punitive legislation will increase as the development phase rolls on.

The petrochemicals industry has made noise many times over the years about becoming more open and more transparent but, as a predominantly business-facing sector, it has been easy to fall back on familiar habits of secretiveness and publicity-aversion.

By positioning itself as a stakeholder in the transition to a circular economy rather than a malefactor to be punished, it may be necessary for representatives of the sector to become more open to public scrutiny, and about their own business practices.

“I do think that as an industry we have been reasonably good in terms of structured discussion with government, I think we’ve been terrible in the discussion of public opinion,” Seward said.

“I think now we’re in a  situation where we need everybody to be engaged in this issue.”

Click here to see regulatory targets and a list of chemical and mechanical recyclers on the ICIS Circular Economy topic page.

By Tom Brown