The American Chemistry Council says the technology aims to create a “circular economy” for plastics.
According to the American Chemistry Council, companies are planning to build large-scale plastic recycling plants, and there are already seven smaller facilities across the U.S. to recycle plastic into new plastic and a handful to convert plastic into transportation fuel.
Among them, Altera Energy, based in Akron, Ohio, said it typically takes in 40 to 50 tons of hard-to-recycle plastic per day, heats it to liquefy, and eventually converts it into 10,000 to 12,000 gallons of oil or hydrocarbons.
“Our mission is to tackle plastic pollution,” said the company’s president, Jeremy DeBenedictis. “It’s more than a slogan.”
De Benedict said that the process of converting plastics used by the company does not involve oxygen, so there is no burning or incineration of plastics. Their products are trucked to petrochemical companies as synthetic oils, what can be called the “molecular-level building blocks” of new plastic production.
He also said that there is currently no other technology that effectively recycles the plastics they receive and that these materials should never be sent to landfills, dumped in the ocean or incinerated.
Fred Schmuck, the company’s chief executive, further added: “It is absolutely impossible for us to achieve our climate goals without addressing plastic waste.”
But environmental groups in the United States dispute this, saying that the real solution should be to reduce the production and use of plastics, and technical solutions such as chemical recycling are temporary solutions. The groups also questioned that, backed by these shiny new technologies, producers around the world could continue to dramatically increase plastic production, further exacerbating the pollution problem.
Environmentalists’ concerns are not groundless. Recycling rates of plastic waste are reported to be miserably low globally, and even more so in the United States – hard-to-recycle plastic products such as plastic packaging, multi-layer films, Styrofoam, etc. accumulate in landfills and the environment, or enter Incinerators emit toxic and harmful gases to surrounding communities.
Monica Huertas, director of grassroots environmental groups in Providence, Rhode Island, said the local community has long suffered from toxic gas from plastic incineration facilities.
“What we’re dealing with now is the plastic incineration facility, which the polluters call a recycling facility, but it doesn’t really recycle plastic,” she said. “We will be extra vigilant to make sure these plastic facilities don’t expand.”
