A Word About Recycling with Ollie Maier

Praying you all have a very happy, safe and holy Easter. Here I’ll continue with an item from a Resource Recycling newsletter on plastic, which I started last week.

Near the end of last week’s article, I wrote about companies switching from glass to plastic containers for their products, because technology is helping produce a better, and often more recyclable, plastic product.

Now continuing this discussion, I find that a report from Closed Loop Partners divides the emerging-technology sector into several distinct categories. It did so as it strives to deliver a relatively non-technical explanation of the market. By doing so, they hoped to make it more understandable.

“While these processes are not new, technology providers are applying them in innovative and exciting ways,” the study notes. “Investors and brands have an opportunity to influence and accelerate solutions that repurpose plastics waste and keep materials in play.”

The Closed Loop Partners, in their year-long research effort identified 60 separate technology providers pushing forward processes the report calls "transformational technologies.” And the American Chemistry Council referred to it as “advanced plastics recycling.”

One of the current companies already has a method to break down post-consumer polystyrene to a monomer that can be used in the production of new plastics.

However, others are much less developed. For example, one firm is currently just using a few pounds of plastics per day to test an oxidation process to decompose post-consumer plastics into shorter chain molecules.

Of the 60 companies involved, more than 40 of them are currently running commercial-scale facilities in the U.S. or Canada. The potential to increase the amount of plastic recycled to a better use is quite significant.

For example, the study showed in 2018, 2.5 million metric tons of recycled plastics were available to buyers. This was just 6 percent of the 38 million metric tons of plastic used in the U.S. and Canada. If a better way is found to use the rest of the scrap plastic, the total value of the material would be around $120 billion.

Currently, each technological method used falls into one of three categories: purification, decomposition and conversion.

Purification methods do not change the material on a molecular level. Instead, they use a solvent to remove additives and dyes.

Decomposition involves breaking molecular bonds of the plastic to recover the simple molecules (monomers) from which the plastic is made.

While conversion also breaks molecular bonds, it results in liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons that can become fuels or the building blocks for new plastics.

While all this is great, don’t hold your breath expecting breakthroughs to happen soon. The article noted, "On average, it’s taken the identified entities 17 years to hit ‘growth scale."

In the meantime, please continue to recycle your plastic bottles and jugs… they will be put to good use.

Till next week, do have an enjoyable and safe one…

--Ollie is a local citizen concerned with the environment and helping others. A retired Air Force fighter and instructor pilot, he is a graduate of Leadership San Marcos and received his degrees at Texas State University where he worked on staff before totally retiring. For questions or comments, he invites you to call him at 512-353-7432 or email omaier@txstate.edu.