Will Chemical Recycling change the recycling industry?

One of the sad truths about plastic recycling is that only a certain percentage of plastic is suitable for the process, which involves shredding the plastic bottles and containers and then using the material to make new products. The rest of the plastic that many people diligently place in the recycle bins winds up in the landfills. However, a new process called chemical recycling may be about to change that state of affairs.

What is chemical recycling? The idea, according to Bloomberg, is that the plastic is broken down into its basic building blocks and then reconstituted into different kinds of products. A company called LyondellBasell is starting a joint venture that will start chemically recycling plastic on an industrial scale. The process is still several years away from becoming reality, but the technology is already well understood.

The beauty of chemically recycling plastic is that all plastic, even the stuff that is being buried in landfills and clogging the oceans, can be transformed from waste into a resource. That means that bans on plastic bags and plastic straws that have proven to be so controversial and inconvenient for consumers become unnecessary. One simply drops the used plastic into the recycle bin, and it gets shipped off to the local facility to be broken down and then reconstituted into new products, a perfect circular economy. People proposing to clean the oceans of plastic pollution will suddenly have an economic incentive to do so.

The process involves the addition of a chemical solvent that heats waste plastic to about 500 degree Celsius to break it down into monomers, which can then be recombined into new plastic products. A research organization in Europe called DEMETO has refined the process by adding microwaves, which accelerate the process from three hours to ten minutes.

The process is energy intensive, but one also must take into account the cost of dealing with waste plastic as opposed to the cost of breaking it down for recycling.