With increased concern over sustainability, single-use plastic has become a primary area of interest. Single-use plastics compose a significant amount of waste and have continued to be a critical point, propelling the need to address how it is managed and created. The OECD estimated that nearly 80 million tonnes of plastic waste was mismanaged globally in 2019.
Increasing the recycled content of single-use plastic may appear to be the most straightforward solution. However, mechanically recycled plastics pose challenges in application in packaging, specifically for the FMCG industry. The key challenges include degradation, where recycled plastics are downcycled from packaging to other applications due to the mechanical processes of recycling.
Secondly, contamination as it can make recycled plastic unsuitable for many food-contact applications.
Advanced recycling has emerged as a potential solution. Advanced recycling methods include solvent extraction, pyrolysis, and depolymerisation. These methods use thermochemical reactions to allow used plastic waste to be made into ‘new’ virgin plastic, which completely circumvents the abovementioned issues of downcycling.
Furthermore, mixed plastics that can be difficult to separate can be processed with advanced recycling methods and converted into plastics suitable for packaging.
IDTechEx’s latest report evaluated the potential of advanced recycling for sustainable packaging applications.
The two categories of advanced recycling include solvent and chemical extraction. Solvent extraction is a process where the polymer is selectively dissolved and added to a solution to create a pure polymer resembling a virgin polymer.
Chemical recycling takes end-of-life plastic back to its monomeric feedstock (the original bonded structure of the polymer), or it is taken further upstream to raw material, allowing it to re-enter the value chain at virgin-grade quality, in theory, an infinite number of times. A key feature of chemical recycling technology includes depolymerisation, which can take complex molecular structures of certain plastics back to the basic bonded structure of polymers through either thermal, chemical or biological processes.
This key feature of chemical recycling is well-suited towards recycling PET (polyethylene terephthalate), commonly used in packaging applications.
Pyrolysis, another feature of chemical recycling, converts mixed plastic waste into pyrolysis oil via thermochemical processes that can be turned into polymer again.
This process can potentially manage two significantly used and popular packaging plastics, such as PE (polyethylene) and polypropylene (PP), which pose challenges when mechanically recycled.
Many FMCG giants have increasingly turned to advanced recycling for the abovementioned benefits, some of which have already debuted packaging containing chemically-recycled plastic.
While chemical recycling is promising and expected to grow, mechanical recycling maintains the position of the dominant recycling method.
However, assessing the sustainability of advanced recycling is imperative. The advantages of chemical recycling, in particular, have been debated. Critics of its use, particularly for pyrolysis, stated the flaws in lifecycle analyses (LCAs) conducted by giants using chemical recycling.
A significant critique revolves around the assumptions around the end-of-life cycle of plastics used for this process was the assumption that these plastics would be incinerated had they not been chemically recycled. Depending on which assumption is applied, chemical recycling may be less beneficial than virgin plastic production in terms of carbon footprint.
Furthermore, the economics of advanced recycling are heavily influenced by the individual process, infrastructure, government policy, and macroeconomic trends, which are heavily influenced by the green premium, making it unclear whether advanced recycling projects are equal in cost efficiency to simply producing virgin plastics.
The capacity for advanced recycling is much smaller than mechanical recycling, a critical barrier to overcome to make advanced recycling a viable solution. These challenges highlight that chemical and advanced recycling would unlikely be a golden ticket solution and would more likely be considered part of the solution. Chemically recycled plastics may prove to help improve sustainability in packaging.
However, the market is more likely to be driven forward by many solutions, including chemical recycling, mechanically recycled plastics, designs for recyclability, bioplastics, and designs that minimise plastic use.
