Han Hendriks – Trinseo’s Chief Technology & Sustainability Officer. We drive forward-thinking material solutions for a better tomorrow.
For those of you over a certain age, you may remember this now famous line from the movie, The Graduate, delivered by the character Mr. McGuire to Benjamin Braddock, played by the actor Justin Hoffman. “I just want to say one word to you. Plastics.” No doubt, plastics have been the subject of much more than movies over the last 50 years. Its role in our society, in many respects, has been the primary catalyst for our global focus on sustainability. While it delivers myriad benefits across almost every industry imaginable, it’s also created its share of unintended consequences, especially related to our environment. But just as chemistry and technology created plastics, they are also coming together to help us better manage plastics by greatly reducing its impact on our environment through advanced recycling technologies.
Understanding Recycling Approaches
When we think about recycling, there are several approaches: mechanical, energy, chemical and physical. Mechanical recycling has been around for a long time, and it’s what most of us are familiar with because it’s used by municipal recycling centers where our household and commercial waste is typically processed. It involves grinding, washing, separating, drying, re-granulating and compounding. And mechanical recycling has a vital role to play in the recycling supply chain. It’s ground zero for many items and materials that can have a future life as a new and different product, or a second generation of what it was before.
Innovations In Chemical And Physical Recycling
Chemical Recycling is a relatively new technology designed to convert material waste at a molecular level to produce virgin-quality raw materials. Chemical recycling is actually an umbrella term for several different processes; depolymerization is a common type. In depolymerization, you are essentially reversing the polymerization process to return polymers to an individual monomer unit, allowing the molecules to be re-bonded into brand-new plastic. This creates the environment to produce new, high-quality plastic products from recycled materials. For example, PC dissolution is a physical recycling method that uses solvents to selectively dissolve polycarbonate (PC) plastic from mixed waste streams, allowing it to be separated and purified, returning it to a nearly original state. It basically cleans the plastic without breaking it down, while removing impurities. This process enables the creation of high-quality recycled polycarbonate that can be reused in making new products. Each of these technologies, and others, is needed to help us realize the promise of a truly circular, closed-loop ecosystem.
Beyond Technology: The Role Of Policy
So, all this technology sounds great, right? It is. But it will take much more than just the technology to make the circular economy a reality. In any industry, efficiencies and economies of scale are achieved when you have some form of predictability. One area where we have work to do with respect to solving our plastic waste management problem is regulatory policy. To create a working, global ecosystem, we need harmonized policies. No doubt every country and local jurisdiction wants to do the right thing when it comes to protecting our planet. Everyone has good intentions. But if we don’t find a way to create more universal policies and regulations that provide predictability and clear guidelines, it is going to be extremely difficult to realize the full potential of what this technology can offer.
Infrastructure And Access Matter
Proper infrastructure is critical in addition to universally aligned policies. If people around the world don’t have access to plastic recycling collection or drop-off centers, we can’t gather the material we need to make this work. Having a map showing your destination is great, but without a means of transportation, it’s unlikely you’ll ever get there.
Designing For The Future
And while aligned policies and infrastructure are critical, they aren’t the only pieces of this puzzle. Designing products with tomorrow in mind is essential. This means thinking ahead about recycling technology and developing products that are going to make the process simpler throughout the value chain. Do they make separation easier? Can we use monolayer material versus multilayer? Can all the parts be made of the same material to make recycling more achievable? Design thinking is foundational to bringing us closer to our goal as a society of creating a circular economy.
Economic Challenges And Feedstock Availability
Two other hurdles that we need to overcome are costs and the availability of sustainable feedstocks. Right now, due to the lack of critical mass across the value chain in terms of adoption rates of recycling by consumers and companies, recycling centers for processing, the integration of these advanced recycling technologies discussed and a truly connected ecosystem, we are not seeing economies of scale that would bring down costs to a level that makes bringing this all to life a natural outcome. If it remains cost-prohibitive for companies to invest without a reasonable return on investment that doesn’t increase the price of their products to a point where their customers are not willing to pay for a more sustainable product, then our chances of success are greatly reduced. In some respects, it is the proverbial chicken versus the egg debate.
A Global Moonshot
In the end, we are talking about a moonshot kind of effort globally. One that requires wide-scale behavioral change around consumption and disposal, in conjunction with wide-scale adoption of a new manufacturing mindset around design and production. And ultimately building infrastructure and advancing technology focused on reduction, reuse, recycling and recovery.
From ‘Plastics’ To ‘Plastics Waste Management’
To come full circle from where we started with the quote from The Graduate. Perhaps now, rather than “one word, plastics.” It’s three words, plastics waste management.” Hopefully, that’s a movie we would all like to see.
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