Advanced recycling technology alleviates landfills and boosts economy

By Ross Eisenberg

This is a lightly edited excerpt of testimony recently provided to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Environment Subcommittee during the hearing “Beyond the Blue Bin: Forging a Federal Landscape for Recycling Innovation and Economic Growth.”

Despite its advances, mechanical recycling cannot process every type of plastic. Contaminated and mixed plastics often cannot be mechanically recycled. Sortation is difficult and error prone, especially for flat, small, and some colored products. 

Each time plastic is melted and reformed, its integrity diminishes, limiting the number of times a plastic can be mechanically recycled. Also, only certain plastics can be mechanically recycled. 

In most cases, films, flexible, and multilayered plastics, like chip bags, cannot be mechanically recycled. And while newer, more effective (and efficient) technologies for mechanical recycling exist, municipalities often rely on older, less effective equipment. 

Due to these limitations, a large portion of plastic is sent to landfills or is incinerated. Some states are running out of landfill space and exporting their waste to other states. Further complicating matters, infrastructure varies community to community, leaving many uncertain of what can be recycled and further.

All of these concerns around recycling have led to depressed recycling rates. Unsurprisingly, low recycling rates have a negative effect on consumers. 

In the past 5 years, the number of consumers that question whether recyclables were truly recycled has more than doubled. When consumers lose confidence in recycling, they stop buying recycled plastic and stop recycling plastic. That is an outcome nobody wants.

Advanced recycling technologies break down post-use plastics to serve as the chemical building blocks for new products, including new plastics. These technologies not only help keep plastic out of landfills, incinerators, and our environment, they help keep used plastic in our economy, helping create a more resilient U.S. supply chain and well-paying American jobs. 

Specifically, advanced recycling can process contaminated plastics, and previously difficult to recycle plastics, such as films, flexibles, dyed, and multilayered/mixed plastic. New technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics at a select number of material recovery facilities (MRFs) are greatly improving sortation capabilities and opening new markets for materials previously destined for the landfill. Because post-use plastic is turned into chemical building blocks, there is not concern about diminished quality, and the end product is fit for food contact and medical purposes.

New recycling technologies can expand our nation’s ability to produce essential materials here in the U.S. Advanced recycling can strengthen our supply chains, improve our competitiveness, grow thousands of new, well-paying U.S. jobs and cut waste. 

Adoption of advanced plastics recycling and recovery facilities in the U.S. could result in 48,500 U.S. jobs, as much as $3.3 billion in annual payroll and $12.9 billion in economic output.

Perhaps most importantly, if advanced recycling does not scale up in the U.S., the plastics that can only be handled by advanced recycling will wind up in landfills or the environment.

Despite the potential for advanced recycling to help us eliminate plastic waste, a plethora of regulatory barriers stand in its way. Conflicting regulations across states create uncertainty for investors in advanced recycling. 

These technologies are inconsistently defined across jurisdictions or categorized as solid waste management or even incineration, subjecting them to permitting frameworks that were never designed with their intended use in mind and/or excluding the output from counting as recycled content. 

For example, New Jersey does not count advanced recycling as a method of meeting post-consumer recycled content mandates. However, other states, such as Washington, permit advanced recycling to count towards recycling provided certain criteria are met. 

[American Chemistry Council] ACC’s position is that advanced recycling of plastic should be regulated as manufacturing and that plastic made with advanced recycling should be regulated as recycled content.

To encourage innovation and investment, federal regulations need to be clear, objective, transparent, and timely. They also need legal certainty. And they should be designed to remove obstacles, not create them. 

The timelines for obtaining permits are already lengthy due to outdated environmental review protocols; inconsistent regulatory frameworks will only worsen this situation and further discourage investment from companies looking to build or scale advanced recycling facilities. 

Ross Eisenberg is the President of America’s Plastic Makers at the American Chemistry Council. 

_{*The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of EnergyPlatform.News.}