Plastic pollutes throughout its lifecycle, from extraction to production to dumping and burning, and everything in between. The petrochemical industry has created a plastic crisis that accelerates climate change, sickens fenceline communities, contaminates drinking water and food supplies, endangers ecosystems, and pollutes the air, the land, waterways, and the ocean. While planning to increase production by 40% in the next decade, industry simultaneously proposes to solve this plastic crisis with a set of technologies it variously refers to as “chemical recycling”, “advanced recycling”, or more recently, “molecular recycling”. Industry uses these terms to conflate recycling with plastic-to-fuel, a form of waste to energy. In this respect, BFFP, whose members fight plastic pollution across its lifecycle, rejects this attempt to distract attention from the urgent need to reduce plastic production.
Chemical recycling will not solve the plastic crisis. Plastic production is growing exponentially: at 3.5% to 4% per year, it will nearly quadruple by 2050. Waste management – including recycling – cannot close an ever-expanding gap nor address the climate and toxic emissions from the plastics life cycle. A dramatic reduction in plastic manufacturing is the first and most important step to addressing the plastic crisis.
Plastic-to-fuel is not recycling. Under the guise of so-called “chemical recycling”, industry is promoting technologies such as pyrolysis that mostly turn plastic into dirty, low value fuels. As almost all plastic is derived from petroleum and natural gas, plastic-derived fuels are not biofuels, not renewable and not climate-friendly. Downgrading plastic into fuel does not replace virgin polymer and is not a form of recycling, as the European Union Waste Framework Directive makes clear. With ongoing decarbonisation, plastic-derived fuels increasingly threaten to displace renewable energy rather than other fossil fuels.
“Chemical recycling” raises serious concerns about environmental justice, toxic waste, emissions, and greenhouse gases. Facilities are commonly sited and located in communities that are disproportionately low income, people of color, or both. Whether to make fuels, chemicals or plastics, available data indicate that these processes are carbon-intensive and produce toxic air emissions, as well as large quantities of hazardous waste in part because of the thousands of toxic additives used in the plastic manufacturing process.
Industry attempts to hide information and duck regulation of “chemical recycling.” Industry must be transparent about the full environmental, public health and climate impacts of “chemical recycling”. Existing regulations, including requirements under the U.S. Clean Air Act and other laws, must be maintained and robustly enforced for “chemical recycling” facilities. Additionally, industry must stop siting facilities in overburdened communities.
Recycling, including “chemical recycling,” is low on the waste hierarchy. With plastic, source reduction must be the top priority. Where plastics are essential, they should be safe and sustainable by design, without toxic additives, and designed to stay in their highest and best use as long as possible through sharing, reuse, and other systems. At the end of life, they should safely degrade or be amenable to safe mechanical recycling. Governments should not provide any form of subsidies to support “chemical recycling” and instead invest in more effective and truly circular solutions like reuse and refill.
Furthermore, BFFP emphasizes that:
- The real solution to the plastic crisis is to be found in production reduction and the scaling of nontoxic reuse and refill systems.
- Recycling means reprocessing materials into products, materials or substances but should categorically exclude any form of waste-to-energy. As such, no plastic-to-fuel operation should ever be allowed under the designation of chemical recycling.
