Author Archives: David Evans

New study reveals ‘staggering’ scale of lost fishing gear drifting in Earth’s oceansLost nets, lines and hooks trap wildlife for years as they float in the ocean, sink to the bottom or are washed ashore

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Enough commercial fishing line is left in the ocean each year to stretch to the moon and back, according to the most comprehensive study ever completed of lost fishing equipment.The staggering amounts of lost gear, which includes 25 million pots and traps and 14 billion hooks, was likely having deadly consequences for marine life, one of the study’s authors said.Enough nets were lost or discarded each year to cover Scotland. If all types of lost line was tied together, it would be able to stretch round the Earth 18 times.
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“This is super confronting,” said Dr Denise Hardesty, of the Australian government’s CSIRO science agency, and one of the study’s authors.“This is having an unimaginable toll of unknown deaths that could result in population level effects for marine wildlife.”Published in the journal Science Advances, researchers from CSIRO and the University of Tasmania used standardised interviews with 451 commercial fishers in seven countries to ask what was being lost.Living sea walls and kelp forests: the plans to lure marine life back to Sydney HarbourRead moreResearchers matched those interviews with data on the amount of commercial fishing globally to estimate what was lost. Annual losses included:
78,000 sq km (30,000 sq miles) of purse seine nets and gillnets
215 sq km of bottom trawl nets
740,000 km (46,000 miles) of main long lines
15.5 million km (9.6m miles) of branch lines
13 billion longline hooks
25 million traps and pots
Fishers in the United States, Morocco, Indonesia, Belize, Peru, Iceland and New Zealand were interviewed. The countries were chosen because they had a fishing industry using most fishing methods.Smaller boats lost more gear than larger boats, and bottom-trawl fishers lost more nets than midwater trawlers.A previous estimate put the percentage of gear lost at a higher level, but that research relied on a range of studies, rather than a standardised estimation based on interviews.Hardesty said fishers often lost nets due to bad weather where equipment wasn’t properly secured or floated away, or gear became entangled with equipment from other vessels competing for the same fish.But she said because nets were designed to catch and kill animals, lost gear would continue to entrap wildlife for years as it either floated in the ocean, sank to the bottom or washed ashore.“That’s birds, turtles, whales, sharks, dolphins, dugongs,” she said.“You are then also catching a whole bunch of fish but then not eating them. That becomes a food security problem because that’s protein that’s not feeding people around the world.”Kelsey Richardson, a lead author from the University of Tasmania, said the detailed estimates should help fisheries managers, the commercial fishing sector, and conservationists to better target solutions.The nets were adding to the global problem of marine plastic pollution, she saidHardesty said there were solutions, such as local governments introducing buy-backs of older fishing gear which tended to get lost more often than new equipment. Tags or labels could be attached to gear, and free facilities could be introduced at harbours to allow fishers to discard unusable nets safely.Richard Leck, head of oceans at WWF Australia, said: “These figures are breathtaking. This gives us a sense of the horrendous scale of the problem and the urgent need to tackle it.Off Tanzania, in one of the world’s richest seas, why is the catch getting smaller?Read more“Ghost nets – as they’re known – are a particularly lethal form of plastic pollution for all the marine life we care about. Once these nets are lost from a fishing vessel, they don’t stop fishing.”Leck said a global plastic pollution treaty currently being negotiated through the United Nations needed to address the problem of ghost nets “at a global level to make sure countries are accountable” through transparent reporting and labelling of fishing gear.“This affects all countries – not just the places where nets are lost. This gear can migrate around oceans and continue to catch fish and entangle threatened species.”TopicsFishOceansFishingFoodMarine lifeReuse this content

Plastic recycling labels are everywhere: The ubiquitous “chasing arrows” symbol adorns everything from plastic bags and water bottles to kids’ toys. 

Most commonly, these symbols appear with a number — 1 through 7 — that identifies the type of plastic resin a product is made of. A number 1, for instance, corresponds to polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — the stuff that makes up water bottles. Number 6 is for polystyrene, used in foam cups and trays. The plastics industry insists these icons were never meant to indicate a product’s recyclability, even though that is how they are often perceived by consumers.

In fact, most plastics are not recyclable, largely because there is no market for materials labeled 3 through 7. But that hasn’t stopped the widespread use of the chasing arrows.

Resin identification codes for polystyrene, left, and polypropylene: danielvfung / Getty Images; Mike Bitzenhofer via Getty Images

With no federal program to evaluate products’ recyclability and issue labels for them, third-party organizations have stepped in to play this role instead. One organization in particular, How2Recycle, has devised an elaborate hierarchy with several versions of its own recycling symbol, which it sells to hundreds of companies ranging from Lowe’s to Beyond Meat. 

The organization, whose parent nonprofit is based in Virginia, says it analyzes waste management systems nationwide to figure out whether companies’ products and packaging are recyclable and then issues a corresponding label. It’s ostensibly an attempt to clear up confusion among consumers about what should and shouldn’t go into the blue bin. The group describes its markers as “recycling labels that make sense.” 

This summer, How2Recycle declared a big victory for the companies it sells labels to: It now considers a wide set of products made from polypropylene, or PP — the resin corresponding to the number 5 — to be “widely recyclable,” meaning the organization thinks that more than 60 percent of Americans have access to a curbside or drop-off recycling program that accepts them. Polypropylene accounts for about 14 percent of the U.S.’s plastic production.

The announcement makes polypropylene tubs, bottles, and jars — things like yogurt containers and ketchup bottles — eligible for How2Recycle’s top-tier recycling label: a chasing arrows symbol with no qualifications. 

But industry experts and environmental advocates have raised their eyebrows. Based on federal recycling data, independent national waste management surveys, and firsthand accounts from material sorting facilities, polypropylene recycling isn’t nearly as widespread as How2Recycle’s labeling implies. Even if PP products were technically accepted by facilities that serve a majority of Americans — which researchers say they are not — polypropylene is much more commonly landfilled or incinerated than turned into new products. This is because it is often filled with toxic chemical additives or contaminated with food waste, both of which make it difficult to turn it into new products. It’s usually less economical to sort out polypropylene for recycling than to simply discard it and make new products from virgin material.

Recycling labels from How2Recycle. Grist / Joseph Winters

“Post-consumer PP packaging and products have never been recyclable or recycled … above a few percent,” said Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer and founder of the advocacy group The Last Beach Cleanup. Through How2Recycle, she said, plastic and packaging companies are “creating their own non-verified data” and ignoring key provisions of the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides, a set of requirements meant to prevent companies from making deceptive claims about the environmental benefits of their products. 

As a result, Dell said, the industry has been allowed to deepen the public’s confusion about recycling, gulling people and policymakers into thinking that it will be able to keep pace with plastic manufacturers’ plans to dramatically scale up production. 

How2Recycle is part of a labyrinth of organizations and industry membership programs that promote “sustainable materials management.” When it officially launched in 2012, the organization branded itself as an attempt to clear up confusion among consumers about what they could recycle. Many companies — including Yoplait, Costco, REI, and Microsoft — were quick to sign on, eager to affix How2Recycle’s labels to their products.

The program took the onus off of individual companies for claims about recyclability. How2Recycle would do all the necessary research into specific products’ recycling rates and community access to recycling programs, allowing participants to rest assured that their recycling labels were compliant with federal law. Today, more than 400 companies pay annual membership fees to place How2Recycle labels on their packages, including Amazon, Clif Bar, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, and Starbucks.

At the top of How2Recycle’s labeling hierarchy is a simple “chasing arrows” recycling symbol, which the organization gives to products that it says are accepted by curbside or drop-off recycling programs that serve at least 60 percent of the American population. This is the label that How2Recycle said in late July some polypropylene products would now be eligible for. Previously, in 2020, the organization had downgraded PP products from the unqualified chasing arrows to a “Check Locally” label that instructed consumers to verify whether their community’s recycling program would accept them.

“As rigid polypropylene access, sortation, and end markets are on an upward trend across the U.S., we are excited to upgrade this packaging format,” Caroline Cox, How2Recycle’s director, said in a press release this summer.

However, other sources paint a very different picture of the United States’ plastic recycling landscape — especially for polypropylene, which is far more difficult to turn into new products than How2Recycle’s labels make it seem. “It is not possible that 60 percent of Americans have access to established recycling systems that accept PP packaging of any type,” Dell, of The Last Beach Cleanup, said. 

Workers sort through plastic and other materials at a material recovery facility, or MRF. Lauren A. Little / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images

First, she explained, industry data suggests that only 60 percent of Americans have access to any recycling program, let alone one that accepts polypropylene containers. Most facilities only accept plastics that are easier to recycle, such as bottles made of PET. And additional data that Dell is compiling for 2022 shows that only half of the country’s 373 material recovery facilities, or MRFs — specialized plants that process and sort all the items people toss in their blue bins — say they accept polypropylene tubs, one of the most recyclable PP products out there (think margarine containers and cottage cheese cups). As a result, only 28 percent of Americans have access to recycling programs that accept these polypropylene containers.

“Overall accessibility for plastic recycling has dropped, if anything,” said John Hocevar, Greenpeace’s oceans campaign director. In recent years, labor shortages and high prices for recycled materials have caused cuts in curbside recycling programs, and many MRFs have stopped accepting most plastic resins. 

What’s more, Hocevar and others argue that the accessibility of recycling programs is a distraction from a more important metric: the real recycling rate. Just because polypropylene is collected doesn’t mean it will ultimately be recycled. According to the most recent available data from the Environmental Protection Agency, only 2.7 percent of polypropylene “containers and packaging” were recycled in 2018. If you include all forms of polypropylene, that number falls to just 0.6 percent.

One reason PP is difficult to recycle is that it’s not as clean or pure as other kinds of plastic. Unlike products made from PET or high-density polyethylene (HDPE) — labeled with the numbers 1 and 2, respectively — polypropylene products, labeled with the number 5, often contain toxic additives that make it difficult to turn them back into usable items. Another reason is that PP is typically collected in bales of mixed plastic that include a variety of resins labeled with the numbers 3 through 7.

In order to be recycled, PP must be picked out of these bales and then sold to an extremely limited number of facilities that will actually accept that plastic. (​​In 2020, Greenpeace estimated that the U.S. only had enough processing capacity to recycle less than 5 percent of its PP waste.) The whole process is prohibitively expensive, especially since the final product must be competitively priced against virgin plastics. According to the EPA, the U.S. generated more than 8 million tons of polypropylene waste in 2018, the most recent year for which data are available.

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Jeff Donlevy, a member of California’s Statewide Commission on Recycling Markets and Curbside Recycling and general manager of Ming’s Recycling, a company based in northern California, said that many facilities continue to accept polypropylene — even if they have no intention of recycling it — because of outdated, 10-or-more-year contracts with cities. At the time when many of these contracts were signed, MRFs said they would accept polypropylene because they could send mixed plastic bales to China for sorting and recycling. But in 2018, when China enacted its “National Sword” policy and closed its borders to most plastic waste imports, U.S. MRFs were saddled with a glut of resins that are uneconomical and logistically difficult to turn into new products.

Of the roughly 80 MRFs in California, Donlevy said the vast majority are not recycling plastics made of resins labeled number 3 and above. This includes polypropylene, number 5. Most facilities are “just landfilling whatever number 5 they get,” he said. 

How2Recycle says on its website that it takes four factors into account when determining a product’s recyclability — collection, sortation, reprocessing, and end markets — but it is not transparent about the exact methodology it uses to evaluate these criteria. Much of its data comes from an industry report conducted by How2Recycle’s parent organization that looks at a “non-random” sample of large recycling programs throughout the U.S., along with a random sample of recycling programs in smaller communities. In the most recent edition of the report, these censuses consisted of web searches for each recycling program to determine what kinds of plastic they accept. 

Environmental advocates question the results of these analyses, but they say the larger issue is that How2Recycle fails to say anything about the real recycling rate of PP products. Again, the “widely recyclable” label is only supposed to reflect a material’s acceptance by curbside and drop-off recycling programs. But this information is not printed on the organization’s unconditional recycling labels. Donlevy said this oversight “misleads the public.” 

It may also contravene sustainable packaging guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, a government agency that promotes consumer protection. By slapping recycling labels without qualifiers onto polypropylene tubs and other containers, How2Recycle appears to be ignoring key provisions of the FTC’s Green Guides, a set of detailed but nonbinding requirements for claims about products’ environmental benefits. The U.S. government does not have a program to issue or approve recycling labels, so this is the primary check for labels created by private groups.

At the broadest level, the FTC says it is deceptive to “misrepresent, directly or by implication, that a product or package is recyclable.” This means that companies should not use a recycling label without qualifiers — like How2Recycle’s gold standard chasing arrows symbol — unless they can prove that recycling facilities for their labeled products are available to at least 60 percent of consumers. Critically, the commission also calls on companies to substantiate that these facilities “will actually recycle, not accept and ultimately discard” labeled products. 

Marketers “should not assume that consumers or communities have access to a particular recycling program merely because the program will accept a product,” the FTC says in the Green Guides’ statement of basis and purpose. Although the guides aren’t legally binding, activity that is inconsistent with them can be used as evidence of a violation of the FTC Act’s provisions on “Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices” and can result in fines or additional rulemaking. State governments can also cite the Green Guides when building false advertising or consumer protection cases.

Dell lamented that the FTC has never, to her knowledge, taken action to stop a company from misusing an unqualified recycling label. But courts have. Take, for example, a 2018 lawsuit filed by a consumer against Keurig over claims that the company’s polypropylene coffee pods were “recyclable.” Keurig argued that its labels were consistent with the Green Guides, but a U.S. District Court in California disagreed and refused to dismiss the case. The court said that even if the coffee pods were technically collected by municipal recycling programs, they were not in practice being recycled. Keurig settled the case this year for $10 million and has changed the labels on its coffee pods.

Keurig coffee pods. Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Greenpeace argues that How2Recycle is using similar sleight with its own labels, claiming recyclability with insufficient substantiation. “Polypropylene does not come close to meeting the requirements” for recycling labels laid out by the FTC, the organization said in a press release. It is neither accepted at recycling facilities that serve 60 percent of the population nor actually recycled at a significant rate. 

In response to Grist’s request for comment, Paul Nowak — executive director of How2Recycle’s parent organization, GreenBlue — said that How2Recycle’s labels not only satisfy the Green Guides’ requirements but “go beyond them.” Although How2Recycle does not have internal data on the real recycling rate for polypropylene, Nowak said How2Recycle has reviewed “letters of support” from MRFs saying that they plan to expand their recycling capacity for polypropylene. Nowak declined to share these letters with Grist.

How2Recycle’s website offers some clarification. Although the organization claims to consider “sortation” and “reprocessing” for products that will feature its labels, How2Recycle explains online that it ultimately does not take into account the real-world recycling rate when evaluating a product’s recyclability — in contrast to definitions of recyclability from other organizations, like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an international nonprofit that advocates for a circular economy.

Nowak insists that How2Recycle spent “several months” verifying data on the increased recyclability of polypropylene. But Dell thinks there’s an irresolvable conflict of interest at play, since How2Recycle and the organizations whose data it cites are run and funded by companies that make and sell plastics. “We’ve got all these front groups funded by the plastics and products industry to create and perpetuate the myth that plastics are recyclable,” she said.

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The recent push to make polypropylene “widely recyclable” started outside How2Recycle, with a separate industry group called the Recycling Partnership — a nonprofit whose board of directors includes executives for major brands and plastic industry groups: Keurig Dr. Pepper, Nestlé, the Association of Plastic Recyclers, and the American Beverage Association, among others. The organization lists roughly 80 “funding partners” on its website, including two of North America’s main petrochemical industry trade groups, the American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Industry Association.

In 2020, a few months after How2Recycle downgraded PP products to only be eligible for the “Check Locally” label, the Recycling Partnership launched a new initiative — directly funded by many plastic brands and industry trade groups — to “ensure the long-term viability of polypropylene.”

The Recycling Partnership claims it contributed to a spike in polypropylene recycling over the past two years through a series of 24 grants worth $6.7 million. The group did not respond to Grist’s request for more information, but a press release notes that the funding helped “support sorting improvements and community education across the U.S.” According to the Recycling Partnership, these grants increased the amount of polypropylene recovered by 25 million pounds annually. Now, the group says its proprietary “National Recycling Database” shows 65 percent of Americans having access to PP recycling.

According to Nowak, the Recycling Partnership approached How2Recycle with this data in early 2022, requesting that How2Recycle reevaluate its labeling for polypropylene. After what Nowak described as a lengthy evaluation process, he said the data matched what he was seeing with How2Recycle’s own analysis, as well as information provided by an outside consulting firm. In response to Grist’s request for comment, the consulting firm said it provided How2Recycle with access-to-recycling data and “end market” research to show there is a market for polypropylene that ultimately does get recycled. The firm did not share data on polypropylene’s real recycling rate and told Grist to reach out to the Recycling Partnership.

How2Recycle, meanwhile, has its own web of connections to big brands and the plastics industry. The group’s parent organization, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, is an industry working group whose members include Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, and the ExxonMobil Chemical Company, as well as a host of other plastic makers. GreenBlue, the umbrella organization that houses How2Recycle and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, has a board of directors that includes executives from the Dow Chemical Company, Mars, the packaging companies Printpack and Westrock, and more.

Nowak said he is aware of concerns over potential conflicts of interest, but that How2Recycle’s parent organizations are “very careful about who we start to work with.” At How2Recycle, he added, “we stay neutral in all that.”

Dell has often spoken of the plastic labeling landscape as the “wild, wild West,” with “no sheriff in town” to protect consumers from deceptive recycling claims. The FTC, whose Green Guides may soon be updated for the first time since 2012, declined to comment on How2Recycle’s labeling system, and environmental advocates have expressed frustration that the commission hasn’t done more to enforce the guidelines.

Without stronger government regulation, Dell said, “How2Recycle and the product companies have filled the void to become the deciders” of what should and shouldn’t bear the recycling label.

But states are catching on. California passed nation-leading legislation last year making it illegal for companies to use the chasing arrows on products that are not actually being turned into new products. (In this case the state, rather than How2Recycle, will determine recyclability, and it will take into account both collection and the real recycling rate.) The law is expected to eliminate recycling symbols on virtually all plastic packaging that isn’t made of number 1 or number 2 resins, since those are the only kinds of plastic currently being recycled with significant regularity. It could have an impact on other states, too — if plastic manufacturers decide it is too cumbersome to create new product lines for the California market, they could decide to remove recycling symbols for the whole country.

Hocevar of Greenpeace said the California bill is an important step in the right direction and called on other states to adopt similar policies. Environmental advocates have also cheered a separate effort from the California attorney general’s office, which announced in April that it was launching an investigation into the petrochemical industry’s “aggressive campaign to deceive the public” about the feasibility of recycling.

Representative Alan Lowenthal speaks during a news conference about the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act in 2020. Sarah Silbiger / Getty Images

To truly address the plastic pollution crisis, Hocevar and others say that the top priority should be turning off the tap — limiting the production of plastic that ultimately has to be dealt with. In the U.S., perhaps the most promising move in this direction is the proposed Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, a far-reaching federal bill that would ban carryout plastic bags and other single-use plastic products, require plastics companies to launch and finance programs to manage the waste they produce, and place a moratorium on new petrochemical facilities until the EPA can undertake a comprehensive assessment of the industry’s environmental impact.

In the meantime, Donlevy said that companies should stop trying to trick consumers into feeling good about their plastic consumption. “Producers have to realize they’re using plastic for their benefit and for the consumers’ benefit, which is fine,” he said. “But to put a recycling symbol and say that that cottage cheese or cream cheese or sour cream container is recyclable? You don’t need to do that, that’s not a part of the sales pitch. … The only plastics that are really getting recycled in the U.S. are number 1 and number 2 bottles.”

With just weeks until many neighborhood streets are flooded with candy-seeking trick-or-treaters, environmentalists and sustainability experts say you should consider taking a second look at the sweet treats you might be planning to hand out — or eat — this Halloween.While chocolate is a crowd-pleaser, the ubiquitous candy “has some pretty close associations with two of the biggest environmental crises that we face right now, and that’s the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis,” says John Buchanan, vice president of sustainable production for Conservation International.What’s more, much of the individually wrapped candies plucked from bowls at parties or hauled home at the end of the night contribute to the spooky holiday’s waste problem.“Halloween should really be called Plasticween,” says Judith Enck, a former senior Environmental Protection Agency official under Barack Obama who now heads the Beyond Plastics advocacy organization. Although costumes and decorations are major sources of plastic, the overabundance of non-recyclable candy wrappers is also cause for concern. Broadly, Enck says, the holiday “is a plastic and solid waste disaster.”The trouble with chocolateBut Enck and other experts emphasize that axing the holiday isn’t the answer. “I would vigorously oppose canceling Halloween,” she says.“I have very fond memories of trick-or-treating as a child. My kids had wonderful times trick-or-treating,” adds Carolyn Dimitri, an applied economist and associate professor of food studies at New York University. “It’s our culture, our custom — we give candy on Halloween.”So, if you’re among the roughly two-thirds of Americans planning to pass out candy this year, here’s how experts recommend treating — rather than tricking — the planet with your choices.Understand the impacts of candy“It’s important for consumers, with any product that they buy, that they educate themselves about where it comes from and how it’s made and the impact of the product on the environment and the social implications of it,” says Alexander Ferguson, vice president for communications and membership at the nonprofit World Cocoa Foundation.The environmental, climate and social impacts of popular candy products are largely associated with two common ingredients, experts say: cocoa and palm oil — both of which can be found in chocolate.“In terms of sustainability, the biggest problems in confectionery are in chocolate,” says Etelle Higonnet, an environmental and human rights expert who helped create the first environmental scorecard for chocolate.Companies typically source cocoa and palm oil from tropical areas often inhabited by people in less economically-developed communities, Dimitri says. According to some estimates, about 70 percent of the world’s cocoa comes from West Africa while around 90 percent of the world’s palm oil trees are grown on a handful of islands in Indonesia and Malaysia.Producing cocoa and palm oil has led to the deforestation of critical rainforests, which poses problems for climate and biodiversity, Buchanan says. West Africa’s Ivory Coast, for instance, has lost 80 percent of its forests since 1970.Preserving these rainforests can help the world meet its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels, he adds.“Deforestation and land use change are such huge drivers of emissions globally,” Buchanan says. “Even if we had a 100 percent perfect solution to green energy and … decarbonization, if you decarbonize the economy tomorrow, we still have to take nature into account if we are to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming. The global community must address both fossil fuel emissions and emissions associated with loss of natural areas and land use.”Cocoa and palm oil are also linked to human rights issues, including forced labor and child labor.Aside from taking steps to provide living wages to cocoa farmers, many of whom have been paid about $1 a day or less, major chocolate manufacturers such as Mars, Nestlé and Hershey have pledged to stop using cocoa harvested by children. But difficulties tracing cocoa back to farms means companies often can’t guarantee that their chocolate is produced without child labor, The Washington Post’s Peter Whoriskey and Rachel Siegel reported in 2019.The chocolate industry is working on achieving better rates of traceability, or knowing where a product comes from, Ferguson says. “That sounds like a very simple thing, but actually it’s quite a hard thing to do when you’ve got many smallholder farmers and a long and complicated supply chain.”The world has pledged to stop deforestation before. But trees are still disappearing at an ‘untenable rate.’Additionally, poverty underpins many of the labor issues affecting those involved in the production of chocolate. Farmers often have to use their own children, because they can’t afford laborers.“People tend to draw conclusions about the use of children in agriculture, and I think it’s important to keep in mind that for a lot of families there is not any other option,” Dimitri says.Cocoa’s child laborersAvoid palm oilOne of the simplest actions concerned consumers can take is to buy candy that doesn’t use palm oil, Dimitri says.“Palm oil is really popular because it has really good mouthfeel and it’s really inexpensive,” she says. But it is possible to find products without the troublesome ingredient.“A lot of candy companies have tried to reformulate their products so that they don’t have palm oil in them because there’s been resistance to it,” she adds.Make sure to check ingredient labels carefully because some products from the same brand will still contain palm oil, even if other items do not.Don’t boycott chocolate, buy betterYou could buy Halloween candy that doesn’t contain cocoa, but experts caution against boycotting chocolate entirely.Cocoa is mostly produced by individual farmers running small operations, Buchanan says. “If there isn’t a market for cocoa, they’re going to be even worse off, so you’re certainly not going to deal with challenges like child labor by taking away a key source of income.”Instead, Ferguson says, “reward companies that are trying to do the right thing and stay engaged.”Some experts recommend looking for third-party certification labels from groups such as Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance that are intended to help distinguish products that meet certain ethical standards. Though these certifications can be flawed and don’t guarantee a perfect product, they are often better than nothing, experts say.“Given the complexities and the challenges of what we’ve seen, I think that there’s really a risk of letting perfect be the enemy of the good,” Buchanan says.Chocolate companies sell ‘certified cocoa.’ But some of those farms use child labor, harm forests.Still, buying certified chocolate means fewer options — and the candy tends to be more expensive. For example, Tony’s Chocolonely, a company that sells Fairtrade-certified chocolate, offers 100 individually packaged chocolates for $48.69. Alter Eco also offers certified food products, including 60-count boxes of individually wrapped truffles for $49.99.Higonnet also points consumers to resources such as the Chocolate Scorecard, which surveys major chocolate companies and ranks them based on criteria such as traceability and transparency, living income, child labor, and deforestation and climate, among others. According to the 2022 scorecard, several major brands that sell more affordable candy options are overall “starting to implement good policies.”“The best thing, regardless of whether you’re buying from a big company or a small company, is to be pushing them and asking them what are they doing to be part of the solution,” Buchanan says. “It’s not as easy as just going to small specialty companies. Those companies have their role and they can do things differently with the way they operate, but they also have a small footprint. We need the big companies as well.”Sign up for the latest news about climate change, energy and the environment, delivered every ThursdayMinimize wasteIt’s also important to try to reduce the amount of non-recyclable waste and uneaten candy that gets thrown away. Keep in mind that you can donate unopened Halloween candy to organizations that send treats to soldiers and first responders or local community drives. But be sure to check donation requirements. Homemade items, for example, often aren’t accepted.Many candy wrappers aren’t commonly recyclable, says Enck of Beyond Plastics, which provides a tip sheet for cutting back on plastic during Halloween. If possible, she suggests buying candy in bulk and putting it in paper bags, which can be recycled. Some popular candies, such as Nerds, Dots and Junior Mints, can also come individually packaged in recyclable cardboard boxes.Although candy doesn’t stay good forever, it can remain safe and edible for longer than you might think, says Gregory Ziegler, a professor of food studies at Pennsylvania State University who specializes in chocolate and confectionery.“From a safety standpoint, candy is pretty safe,” Ziegler says. “It has very little moisture in most of it and a lot of sugar is really what protects it from much microbial growth that might make it unsafe.”But, he notes, there is a difference between safe and edible. The shelf life for most candy ends because of texture or flavor change, which can affect enjoyment, he says. For example, if chocolate melts and rehardens it can develop a white-ish cast known as bloom, which isn’t harmful but might cause the candy to taste bad.Ziegler recommends storing Halloween candy in a dry, sealed container. You can also put sweets into the freezer or refrigerator. “Almost all the reactions that cause candy to go bad slow down the lower the temperature is.”Most candy should last six months, he says. “If you treat it right, maybe longer than that.”

(from left to right) Andrea Smith, Carbon Reduction Project Manager (Chichester District Council), Lissie Pollard (the Final Straw Foundation), Canon Precentor, The Reverend Dr Jack Dunn (Chichester Cathedral) and Councillor Penny Plant, Cabinet Member for Environment and Chichester Contract ServicesThis fish, nicknamed Nellie has been moved around the local area since 2019. It will be in the Cathedral grounds throughout October. It is made from scrap metal, including old trailer parts and metal warehouse clothing cages.The idea is simple – the public fills Nellie up with their used plastic bottles and aluminium cans, illustrating just how many of these disposable items we use and the huge volume of waste we create.Nellie is a visual way to bring home the message that we are filling our oceans and sea life with plastic.It aims to highlight the huge volume of single-use plastic bottles still in use every day in the UK, estimated at 7.7 billion every year.Every single day, it’s been estimated that around 16 million plastic bottles in the UK are not recycled, which means they will end up in landfills, incinerators or our natural environment.The Cathedral’s Canon Precentor, The Reverend Dr Jack Dunn, said: “We are delighted to be working with the District Council, and the Final Straw Foundation, once again – this time hosting Nellie on the Cathedral Green this October. Her arrival marks the start of a season of the Cathedral celebrating our beautiful and diverse environment here in East and West Sussex. Further details of this, including a special event for families this Half Term, can be found on our website: chichestercathedral.org.uk”Lissie Pollard, from the Final Straw Foundation, is pleased with Nellie’s impact.She said: “We really hope the fish will be a talking point at the Cathedral, encouraging people to think about how many water or soft drinks bottles they buy and dispose of each year. It will hopefully inspire the local community to remember to always carry a reusable bottle, and to be more conscious about recycling effectively. Our primary goal is to reduce these items in the first place through the use of reusable items, so that we don’t need to recycle them at all.”Councillor Penny Plant, Cabinet Member for Environment at Chichester District Council said: “It’s really important that we encourage people to recycle as much as they can, and I know that these sorts of visual reminders can be extremely effective at helping change people’s behaviour, by making people realise just how much waste is created. Plastic pollution in the ocean is a huge problem which we can all help play our part in preventing and I’m delighted that our council was able to organise Nellie’s return to Chichester. The sculpture is intended for plastic bottles and cans only, and we would ask that people do not place soft plastic bags or coffee cups in there. I urge everyone to make sure that they recycle their plastic bottles once they have finished with them as well as trying to reduce their use of plastic them in future.”

Global healthcare injection molding and packaging leader continues to strengthen efforts to address plastic waste and advocate for circularityNORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / October 10, 2022 / Technimark, a global manufacturing provider for the medical devices, pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare markets, announced today that it has joined the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC) to further invest in its commitment to current and expanding sustainability efforts. HPRC is a private technical coalition of industry peers across manufacturing, healthcare and recycling industries seeking to improve the recyclability of plastic products within healthcare.”We are very pleased to welcome Technimark as a new member,” said Peylina Chu, director of HPRC. “In addition to having a wealth of plastic packaging expertise, Technimark also brings recycling expertise to the table, as they operate an in-house mechanical recycling facility and have been recycling post-consumer and post-industrial materials for almost 20 years. This unique combination of manufacturing and recycling experience will be a welcome addition to HPRC as we look to collaborate across the value chain to enable plastic recycling solutions in healthcare.”Corporate Vice President, ESG, Katie Distler, is looking forward to engaging more deeply with HPRC as the company strives to reduce its environmental impact.”We are driven to develop innovative solutions for our customers,” said Distler. “We’re passionate about addressing the issue of plastic waste and our involvement with HPRC will enable us to participate with like-minded plastic recycling innovators to further revolutionize the process.”Since the founding of its own plastics recycling company in 1995, Technimark has been actively engaged in plastic recycling and spearheading sustainability solutions for its clients around the world.”We understand that our customers desire more sustainable solutions, of which we can offer many now,” added Technimark’s Senior VP of Sales for Healthcare, John Rugari. “We view recycled healthcare plastics as a valuable resource and we are excited to join with the HPRC to address barriers and advance viable, safe and cost-effective solutions for the healthcare sector.”Technimark’s Director of Material Development, Tom Frantz, will serve on the HPRC Steering Committee and play a key role in the relationship.”We are elated to partner with HPRC in the research, testing and development of new methods for recycling medical plastics for use in producing new healthcare products,” said Frantz. “Working alongside other experts to promote and improve circularity will greatly benefit the industry and the planet.”About TechnimarkTechnimark is a global manufacturing solutions provider for the healthcare, consumer packaging and specialty industrial markets. Technimark specializes in precision injection molding, value-added assembly and full supply chain services. Technimark provides clients with customized, end-to-end solutions based on technology and innovation that improve quality, reduce risk, lower costs and speed products to market. With facilities in the United States, Mexico, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and China, Technimark delivers high-quality products worldwide. As part of Technimark’s commitment to sustainable and responsible business practices, the company has embedded the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact into strategies and operations, and committed to respecting human and labor rights, safeguarding the environment, and working against corruption in all its forms. For more information, visit technimark.com.Contact:Chuck Norman, APR[email protected]+1 919.625.9873About HPRCHPRC is a private technical coalition of industry peers across manufacturing, healthcare and recycling industries seeking to improve the recyclability of plastic products within healthcare. HPRC is made up of brand leading and globally recognized members committed to shaping the future of plastics recycling and reducing the environmental footprint of not only their own operations but also the operations of their customers. Committed to continuous dialogue, HPRC explores ways to enhance the economics, efficiency, and ultimately the quality and quantity of healthcare plastics collected for recycling. HPRC is active across the United States and Europe working with key stakeholders, identifying opportunities for collaboration and participating in industry events and forums. For more information, visit www.hprc.org and follow HPRC on LinkedIn.View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council on 3blmedia.com.Contact Info:Spokesperson: Healthcare Plastics Recycling CouncilWebsite: http://www.hprc.orgEmail: [email protected]SOURCE: Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council

A parliamentary committee wants Ottawa to limit the environmental damage and plug response gaps for marine cargo spills after a container ship lost more than 100 sea cans and was immobilized by a stubborn fire on the B.C. coast last year. The ZIM Kingston, owned by Greece-based Danaos Shipping Company Ltd., burned for a week after containers with combustible chemicals caught fire in the wake of stormy weather. But first a mass of containers, two carrying hazardous materials, washed overboard on the southern coast of Vancouver Island on Oct. 21. Debris from the containers, most of which have never been retrieved, is still washing up on West Coast shores, with reports last month suggesting it has reached as far north as Alaska. Get daily news from Canada’s National ObserverThe federal government, province and coastal communities aren’t operationally prepared to manage marine cargo spills, particularly those involving hazardous or noxious substances, the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans determined after investigating the incident.There’s little ability to locate or salvage lost containers and contain long-term environmental impacts, and marine towing and firefighting capacity is deficient, the committee found. Coastal communities saw plastic pollution, marine debris and even a collection of fridges land on pristine beaches on northwest Vancouver Island after the spill, Lisa Marie Barron, the federal NDP fisheries and oceans critic, told Canada’s National Observer.Only four of the shipping containers have been found and retrieved from the shore, with the rest presumably littering the seabed. What people are reading NDP fisheries critic Lisa Marie Barron notes that more than 100 shipping containers are still missing from the ZIM Kingston cargo spill. Photo courtesy Lisa Marie Barron’s office It was shocking there was no extended effort to find or retrieve most of the missing containers, said Barron, who requested the standing committee study the issue. “If one of those containers had gold bars in them, we’d find a way to get it out of the ocean,” the MP for Nanaimo-Ladysmith said. The federal government, province and coastal communities aren’t operationally prepared to manage marine cargo spills, particularly those involving hazardous or noxious substances, a federal committee finds after the ZIM Kingston cargo spill in B.C. “Instead, they are just left there … and they will inevitably open, and the debris will wash up on our shores for years to come.” The committee investigation, launched in January, provided 29 recommendations to the federal government to improve the response to marine cargo spills. Although no fisheries were closed as a result of the cargo losses, the report stated, two shipping containers with a combined 42,000 kilograms of hazardous chemicals — potassium amyl xanthate and thiourea dioxide, used in mining and the textile sectors respectively — were lost at sea. The chemicals posed limited environmental risks because they were expected to dilute and be distributed widely in the ocean, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. But given there is no way to track containers, it’s difficult to monitor or mitigate any potential environmental concerns that might arise from their loss, said Alys Holland, youth co-ordinator with the Pacific Rim chapter of Surfrider Foundation Canada. And plastics — particularly polystyrene foam typically used in molded forms to protect goods or to make packing peanuts — will break down and persist for decades, if not centuries, to be widely distributed in the ocean and on shores, the committee heard. Polystyrene and nurdles from marine debris are much more insidious and have a longer-term impact than even oil, Stafford Reid, environmental emergency planner and analyst, told the committee. Given concerns were repeatedly raised about polystyrene foam, the committee recommended Canada spearhead an international effort to ban the product in marine transport packaging, and better monitor and research the particular plastic’s impact on the marine environment, Barron said. Shipping containers should also be outfitted with tracking devices to make it easier to locate them if they are lost, said committee member Liberal MP Ken Hardie. “Something that allows us to at least find out where they are, and to determine whether or not they could be salvaged in some cases, or if left alone, that they’re going to be fine,” Hardie said.There were also gaps in the response and communications in the ZIM Kingston incident, Hardie said. More proactive infrastructure needs to be in place, such as having pre-approved salvage and cleanup operators from B.C., First Nations and coastal communities that have the expertise and local knowledge of the region, he added. Canada isn’t prepared for a co-ordinated spill response for hazardous substances other than oil, particularly in terms of towing or firefighting, salvage capabilities or appropriate onshore facilities, experts told the committee. There’s also the need to improve transparency around what is washed overboard and the financial accountability of shipping companies involved in cargo spills, Barron said. The committee heard coastal and Indigenous communities and cleanup groups — on the front lines of a spill and the first to begin cleaning up debris — aren’t integrated in a spill response, nor do they get a specific understanding of what they’d find washing up on their shores. Not having specific cargo manifests available also makes it difficult to ensure the polluter continues to pay when marine debris washes ashore years after an incident, Barron noted. A shipping company is also only liable for cleanups for a maximum of six years after the incident and financial responsibilities are limited, the committee heard. As a result, the federal government should examine other mechanisms to ensure money is available immediately and in the long term for environmental damage from cargo spills, the committee recommended. Shipping volumes are on the rise along with extreme weather incidents and it’s imperative that the federal government develop a clear plan to prevent cargo spills, Barron said. Overboard cargo containers spiked in 2020/21 with an annual average loss of more than 3,000 containers due to severe weather, according to the World Shipping Council. “Coastal communities are the ones feeling the brunt of the debris that continues to wash up,” Barron said. “And if we’re just leaving containers in the sea, we need to have a cleanup plan that looks longer term.” Rochelle Baker/Local Journalism Initiative/Canada’s National Observer

California has a new environmental law that’s described as either a major milestone on the road to tackling the scourge of plastic pollution—or a future failure with a loophole big enough to accommodate a fleet of garbage trucks.

The law, which seeks to make the producers and sellers of plastic packaging responsible for their waste, divided California’s sizable environmental community during its development over the last few years. Key environmental organizations eventually came around to supporting it. But more than three months after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed what’s known as SB 54, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act is still stirring controversy.

After tense negotiations under pressure from a looming, high-stakes deadline, a compromise last summer won the day—and political leaders were able to claim a big environmental victory in the battle to take a bite out of the global plastics crisis.

Among its provisions, the law requires certain types of packaging in the state to be recyclable or compostable by 2032. It cuts plastic packaging by 25 percent in 10 years and requires 65 percent of all single-use plastic packaging to be recycled in the same timeframe.

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In September, Dow declared a milestone in its effort to mitigate the flow of plastic waste. The big chemical company and Mura Technology took the wraps off a project in Böhlen, Germany, to build a plant based on Mura’s supercritical steam process. The facility will convert mixed plastic waste into hydrocarbon liquids that Dow will load into its ethylene cracker at the site for conversion back into new plastics.

In brief
Major chemical companies are backing pyrolysis plants for converting plastic waste into hydrocarbon feedstocks that can be turned into plastics again. They see it as a way to capture more plastics than they can with conventional mechanical recycling alone. But conducting pyrolysis at a significant scale will pose challenges. For instance, developers of pyrolysis processes have to tune their plants so they can convert a variety of polymers into products that petrochemical makers can use. Moreover, some plastics, such as polyvinyl chloride, can complicate the pyrolysis systems. How the technology works in the real world will affect the public’s perception of the plastics industry.

The plant will be the largest of its kind in Europe, diverting 120,000 metric tons (t) of waste per year from incinerators. It will be six times the size of Mura’s first plant, still under construction in Teesside, England. The partners hope to build additional facilities at Dow sites in Europe and the US for a total of 600,000 t of annual capacity.
“Böhlen is sort of a base case, and it will just get larger from there,” Oliver Borek, Mura’s chief commercial officer, said during a press conference. An executive from the engineering firm KBR, which is licensing the process beyond Dow and Mura, noted that his firm is already designing three plants in South Korea and one in Japan.
Petrochemical makers are fully behind the broad array of pyrolysis processes, like Mura’s, under development around the world. Nearly every large chemical company—Dow, BASF, Shell, ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell Industries, Sabic, Ineos, Braskem, and TotalEnergies, to name some—either has joined hands with a smaller firm developing a process or is creating its own.

These firms argue that pyrolysis can make up for the shortcomings of mechanical recycling, the familiar process of washing and repelletizing the plastics that consumers drop into blue bins. Only two polymers—the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) found in soda and water bottles and the high-density polyethylene in milk jugs and other such containers—are widely recycled at an appreciable scale. And it is difficult to get even these relatively homogeneous materials up to the contamination specifications needed for food-contact use. In all, mechanical recycling manages to capture only about 9% of plastics in the US, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Recyclers can tackle a few more resins with depolymerization processes that break down polymers into their chemical precursors. For example, methanolysis can be used to recycle PET products like fibers and sheets that aren’t amenable to mechanical methods. And firms have been breaking down nylon using hydrolysis for many years.

We kind of joke sometimes that every day we need to make a birthday cake, but the ingredients keep changing all the time, and the birthday cake better be good and taste the same.
Eric Hartz, cofounder, Nexus Circular

But the bulk of the plastics we use—the candy wrappers, stand-up pouches, potato chip bags, protective packaging, single-use cups, frozen food bags, razors, toothpaste tubes, cotton swabs, and other objects of our daily lives—defy both mechanical recycling and depolymerization.
These items are constructed from multiple plastics that are nearly impossible to separate. Plus they are mostly made of polyolefins like polyethylene and polypropylene, which have strong carbon-carbon bonds that resist depolymerization. For these mixed plastics, pyrolysis is the industry’s only currently viable tool for recovering raw materials and making new polymers.

Honeywell UOP says it has run this pyrolysis plant at pilot scale for more than 2 years.Honeywell UOP

But a pyrolysis reactor isn’t a magic box that can make the plastics industry’s waste problems vanish. The process is superficially simple: using high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to break down plastics into a mixture of smaller molecules known as pyrolysis oil. Yet converting the different kinds of plastics that can end up as waste into an uncontaminated feedstock—such as the C5–C12 paraffins that would be an ideal naphtha feedstock for an ethylene cracker—poses considerable challenges. Plastics companies will need to overcome these challenges if they are to debunk environmentalists’ objections and meet their own goals for reducing waste and carbon emissions.

The pyrolysis cauldron
“We kind of joke sometimes that every day we need to make a birthday cake, but the ingredients keep changing all the time, and the birthday cake better be good and taste the same,” says Eric Hartz, cofounder and president of the pyrolysis firm Nexus Circular. “There’s a kind of art going on here when dealing with heterogeneous inputs as opposed to homogeneous. There’s not a perfect science to it about why some compounds behave the way they do in these environments.”

PyrolysisThis industry-backed path to plastics circularity chemically breaks down plastics into their component parts so they can be made into new plastics.

1. PretreatmentThe feedstock for pyrolysis plants is ideally made up of polyolefins such as polyethylene and polypropylene. Errant materials like oxygen-containing polyethylene terephthalate and chlorine-laden polyvinyl chloride are removed.

2. PyrolysisThe plastics are heated to about 500 °C in the absence of oxygen. The longer molecules break into liquid fractions like naphtha and diesel, solid cuts like waxes, and lower-molecular-weight gases. In most plants, roughly 10% of the product is char, a by-product.

3. Landfill disposalThe char is hauled to the landfill or can be added to asphalt or concrete. Most plants burn the gases for heat.

4. UpgradingFor the output to be suitable for making new plastics, adsorbents and hydroprocessing may be needed to remove chlorine, nitrogen, and other pollutants. A hydrocracker, or similar unit, is sometimes needed to further break down large molecules.

5. Using wasteThe naphtha is processed in an ethylene cracker to create ethylene and propylene, building blocks for more polyethylene and polypropylene.

One challenge of pyrolysis is the variability of the feedstock. The different polymers that are fed into a pyrolysis reactor break along different patterns. In particular, molecules with high degrees of branching crack more easily than linear ones.
According to a review paper by University of Minnesota Twin Cities bioproduct and biosystem engineer Roger Ruan and other scientists, polypropylene decomposes at 378–456 °C, while low-density polyethylene breaks apart at 437–486 °C, and high-density polyethylene at 452–489 °C. As a result, firms processing mixed plastic waste must select a temperature—normally over 500 °C—at which all the polymers they take in on a given day will break down.
However, temperature affects the composition of a pyrolysis unit’s output. Pyrolysis yields useful liquids, such as naphtha and diesel. But it also creates less-desirable waxes that might need to be broken down further. And pyrolysis makes lighter gases that are typically burned as fuel in the reactor. High temperatures and long reactor residence times might cut wax output and yield more naphtha, but they also create gases that have limited utility.
High temperatures can also lead to dehydrogenation, cyclization, aromatization, and Diels-Alder reactions, thereby creating more aromatics. “For fuels and so on, it’s fine,” Ruan says. “But sometimes we want naphtha feedstock for new plastics production; we don’t want a lot of aromatics.”
And feeding the wrong plastics into pyrolysis reactors creates inefficiency and can contaminate the output. PET contains oxygen and tends to form carbon dioxide, Ruan says. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) yields chlorinated compounds. Additionally, some plastics have a lot of inorganic additives, such as carbon black, carbonate, and clay. They lead to the formation of char, which pyrolysis operators must dispose of as solid waste.
Environmentalists cry foul
Environmentalists loathe pyrolysis. And a growing number of jurisdictions, such as California, don’t consider it recycling at all. One critic is Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who founded and heads the Last Beach Cleanup, an environmental organization. She has helped larger environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace, prepare reports on the practice. For presentations, Dell has compiled 16 pages of objections.
One of Dell’s primary complaints is that pyrolysis facilities can’t actually accept the mixed plastic waste they claim they can. The residual PVC, PET, and other materials in the stream gum up the process too much.
“There’s too many types,” Dell says. “There are too many additives. You can’t recycle them all together, and separating them out defies the second law of thermodynamics. It is just impossible to reorder—like Humpty Dumpty—all these plastics once they’ve been put into a curbside bin.”
Dell contends that Renewlogy, a Utah-based company that was developing a pyrolysis plant, folded for precisely this reason. Her bullet points even contain a photo from a Nexus Circular facility in Atlanta showing bales of relatively clean plastic film of the type used at warehouses—evidence, she says, that the company isn’t accepting much postconsumer mixed plastic waste.

It is just impossible to reorder—like Humpty Dumpty—all these plastics once they’ve been put into a curbside bin.
Jan Dell, founder, the Last Beach Cleanup

A second charge is that pyrolysis is really incineration, even though pyrolysis reactors operate in the absence of oxygen. “If you look at just the pyrolysis vessel itself, no, there’s no burning. I have to agree with that,” Dell says. “But here’s the deal: How do you heat that pyrolysis vessel to the 900 to 1,500 °F you need? You heat it by incinerating the gas that comes off of it.”
Dell points to the pyrolysis company Brightmark, which disclosed to the EPA that 70% of the output from a plant it is building in Ashley, Indiana, will be gases that it plans to use for energy or flare. Brightmark now says those figures were submitted in error. Such gases represent only about 18% of the output, the firm says, and it is submitting the updated figure to the EPA.
Another critique has to do with scale. Dell says that roughly 120,000 t per year of pyrolysis and other chemical recycling capacity is currently onstream in the US. This represents a minuscule fraction of the overall plastics production of about 56 million t in North America in 2021, according to the American Chemistry Council. Just one new polyethylene plant has about 500,000 t of annual capacity.
To critics like Dell, pyrolysis is a greenwashing scheme meant to fool the public into thinking plastics are recycled more than they actually are. She points out that the industry, under similar pressure in the early 1990s, built up a lot of recycling capacity, only to shutter it when the projects proved unworkable and public attention faded. The industry is now repeating this pattern, Dell says.
Industry steps up
Industry executives say they are more committed than ever to recycling and are eager to practice pyrolysis at large scale. Their firms are building facilities that are bigger than before and are testing them in the real world. They are aware of the wrinkles in a pyrolysis-based recycling system and say they are determined to iron them out.
Manav Lahoti, global sustainability director for hydrocarbons at Dow, says experimentation will improve the systems over the long run.
“Sometimes you take this approach where there are successes and then there are failures and you singularly focus on the failures and say, ‘Oh, it’s just not working,’ ” he says. “Is there a momentum with companies like us to actually create a solution for this challenge? The answer to that is yes. And then along the way, you will have some successes and you will have some failures.”

Pyrolysis reactors at Nexus Circular’s plant in AtlantaNexus Circular

Brightmark is experiencing its share of obstacles. The plant that the company is starting up in Indiana, at a cost of $260 million, is designed to convert 100,000 t of mixed plastic waste per year into naphtha, diesel, and industrial waxes.
At the end of 2020, Bob Powell, Brightmark’s CEO, said construction of the facility was 80% complete and ready to ramp up production in 2021. But by April 2022, the company had manufactured only about 2,000 t of product. Now Powell says it will run at full scale next year.
“The biggest challenge at this time has been COVID,” Powell says. The pandemic delayed the delivery of equipment and made it difficult to find enough labor to work at the plant. The company also suffered a fire in May 2021 that it calls a “minor setback” in an email.
In another setback, Brightmark canceled plans to build a $680 million plant in Macon, Georgia, that would have been four times the size of the Ashley facility. The plant faced local opposition. And Brightmark was counting on about $500 million in bonds from the Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority, but the deal stipulated that Brightmark get the Ashley plant going, and the county pulled its support after determining that the company hadn’t succeeded in Indiana.
Powell says Brightmark was treated unfairly. “These are questions that I think with a tour of the facility that folks could have had answers to pretty quickly,” he says.
Brightmark, an early mover in pyrolysis, has also had to contend with evolving market demands, according to Powell. When the company started building its facility in 2019, the main concern was diverting plastics from the waste stream. Naphtha and diesel output was earmarked for the fuel market.
“In the intervening 3 years, the demand for fully circular plastics has exponentially grown,” he says. Now Brightmark aims to sell naphtha to chemical companies as a plastics raw material and wants to see its diesel end up in chemical markets as well.
Because of this increased demand for recycled feedstock, Nexus Circular is getting a lot of attention from big petrochemical makers. The company’s plant in Atlanta has 13,000 t of annual capacity. About 80% of its output is what Hartz describes as a mix of naphtha, gasoline, diesel, and heavier waxes. The rest is gases that Nexus uses for heat.
Shell and Chevron Phillips Chemical are already using output from the Nexus plant in their US petrochemical crackers. Dow has agreed to take the output from a plant in Dallas that will be twice the size of the Atlanta plant. Nexus also aims to build a 30,000 t unit in Chicago that will supply Braskem, one of its investors.
Hartz says one thing that sets his company apart is that it can handle different forms of plastics, such as usually hard-to-recycle films, with limited presorting. Nor does it need to process its output with distillation or hydrotreating, which he says “adds tremendous costs” as well as environmental burden.
Hartz happily concedes Dell’s point that Nexus is persnickety about the waste plastics it consumes. To avoid sorting and postprocessing, the firm does focus on acquiring relatively homogeneous polyolefin streams, like pallet wrap from retailers. While these materials might not fit everyone’s idea of postconsumer plastics, Hartz says, they were still destined for the landfill.
Nexus pays a premium for such plastics versus mixed household waste. “They’re not free if you want the right quality,” Hartz says. “If you want garbage, then you’re going to have to set up a very, very expensive process before you can even use it.”
Readying for pyrolysis
Many other companies are taking that approach and attempting to procure more mixed waste. “If you talk about true circularity going forward at scale, you are talking about mixed plastic waste; you are not talking about presorted polyolefins,” says Artem Vityuk, a global market manager at BASF. “You are really trying to expand the base of feedstock, and you need to be able to work with really contaminated feed.”
That means the output of pyrolysis units that consume a broad array of plastics must be upgraded to eliminate contamination. BASF recently introduced a new portfolio, called PuriCycle, of catalysts and adsorbents that eliminate such contaminants. The portfolio targets pyrolysis plants trying to meet customer specifications and petrochemical companies that want to clean feedstock coming from multiple sources.
Vityuk explains that contaminants such as halogens, oxygen, nitrogen, and metals are all found in the hydrocarbons coming out of pyrolysis plants. “That is what is in the plastics,” he says.
These contaminants can be nettlesome. An ethylene cracker might tolerate only 1 ppm of chlorine in its feed, so even one piece of PVC pipe in a pyrolysis reactor’s daily delivery can cause problems for a chemical company customer. BASF offers adsorbents to soak up the chlorine compounds. The product line also includes adsorbents and prehydrogenation catalysts marketed as being able to filter out particulate matter and eliminate the most reactive compouinds from the feedstock stream.
BASF also offers hydroprocessing catalysts similar to those that oil refineries use to displace sulfur with hydrogen. “We actually optimized the catalyst to make sure it’s suited for service in plastic pyrolysis oils,” Vityuk says. “It’s not a copy and paste from the refining area.” For example, rather than focusing on sulfur, the catalysts help remove nitrogen, which is in plastics such as nylon.
Steve Deutsch, a consultant with the Catalyst Group, says pyrolysis oil variability is an issue that the industry will need to tackle. While there are standards for ethylene cracker raw materials, “there’s nothing similar for pyrolysis oil,” he says. “The industry needs to evolve in such a way that it becomes more standardized.”
Petrochemical companies are starting to build infrastructure to process the products of pyrolysis plants. Shell is constructing upgraders at its chemical complexes in Moerdijk, the Netherlands, and Singapore to remove contaminants from pyrolysis oil sourced from third parties. Each will be capable of handling 50,000 t of oil per year.
“Due to the nascent stage of the chemical recycling industry, we can expect a large variation in the quality of the pyrolysis oil, whereby the upgrading step becomes integral in increasing usable quantities,” says Philip Turley, global general manager for plastics circularity at Shell.
Shell has already locked up supplies from various firms that might be able to supply the upgraders with pyrolysis oil. For instance, it has invested in BlueAlp, and the two plan to build 30,000 t per year of plastics pyrolysis capacity in the Netherlands. Shell also has an offtake agreement with Pryme, another European pyrolysis company.
Similarly, Dow is working with the engineering firm Topsoe to build a purification unit for pyrolysis oil at its complex in Terneuzen, the Netherlands. Like Shell, Dow says its unit is meant to purify and homogenize feedstocks that come from a variety of pyrolysis plants. “Some have a feedstock that still needs cleaning or processing before you can put it into a cracker. Some we can’t even look at,” Lahoti says, pointing to those with a high aromatic and naphthalene content.
“When you go from the start-up phase, which is where a lot of these companies are, you start thinking about how these technologies fit in the chemical industry,” Lahoti says. “And this is where a company like Dow allows some of these start-ups to be successful because we bring our technology experience, our processing experience, and we kind of help pull some of these feeds into our system.”
The technology evolves
Lahoti says pyrolysis processes themselves are evolving to better suit the petrochemical industry. He sees “a transition away from conventional pyrolysis to different technologies, some of which were built on conventional pyrolysis as a foundation but have advanced to a point where it’s not just pyrolysis.”
For instance, Lahoti doesn’t consider Mura’s technology to be pyrolysis. The key development is supercritical steam, which transfers heat directly to the polymer particles. In ordinary pyrolysis, heat comes from the kiln and is transferred by poorly conductive plastic particles. “The bigger you make the kiln, the harder it gets for that heat to get in there,” Lahoti says.
Firms are also introducing catalysis into the pyrolysis reactors themselves. In addition to lowering the activation energy of the process, catalysts can tune the output to more desirable products. After pyrolysis, you’re left with some molecules with 40 or 50 carbons—too big to feed to a cracker directly, the Catalyst Group’s Deutsch says. “With catalytic pyrolysis, you can make that distribution both narrower and toward the lighter end.”
Since 2020, LyondellBasell has been running a pilot plant in Ferrara, Italy, to test its catalytic pyrolysis technology, called MoReTec. While the company hasn’t said what catalysts it is testing, many pyrolysis research groups are working with zeolite catalysts, such as ZSM-5, that are commonly used in refining.
A sure sign that interest in pyrolysis is taking off is that large engineering companies are licensing technologies to third parties that want to get into the business. KBR is licensing Mura’s process. Lummus Technology is marketing a technology from New Hope Energy. And late last year, Honeywell UOP unveiled its own process, called UpCycle.
Kevin Quast, global business lead for Honeywell’s plastics circularity business, says Honeywell UOP’s reputation is a big help in the marketplace. “People like the UOP name,” he says. The firm “is very familiar with these types of technologies and is able to take something from pilot scale to a commercial scale.”
UOP bought the rights to a process that had been running in Europe for several years in the 1990s. The company has been piloting and refining it for 2½ years.
Quast notes some key differences between UpCycle and other pyrolysis systems. For instance, Honeywell UOP has a pretreatment step in which it selects the right plastics for the system and melts them down before they go into the main reactor. What comes out is a light fraction, like naphtha and diesel, as well as a heavier cut. The heavier stream can be sent to a fluidized catalytic cracker to make propylene.
Honeywell UOP is forming two joint ventures, one in Spain with the infrastructure firm Sacyr and another in Texas with the recycler Avangard Innovative. Honeywell UOP is also licensing the process for plants in China and Turkey.
The scale of the Honeywell UOP plants—30,000 t per year—is a “sweet spot” for the amount of feedstock that can be gathered in a midsize city, Quast says. He questions whether some of the larger pyrolysis plants that have been announced will be able to acquire feedstocks economically.
Another sign that pyrolysis is hitting the big time is that one of the world’s largest oil companies, ExxonMobil, is making a push. Next month, the company will complete a pyrolysis facility at its petrochemical complex in Baytown, Texas, with the capacity to process 30,000 t of plastics per year.
“We’re actually processing the plastic waste directly in our own facility,” says Natalie Martinez, feed-to-value business manager at ExxonMobil. She declines to provide more detail about the equipment being used or the postprocessing involved.
Colocating plastics pyrolysis at a petrochemical complex allows ExxonMobil to use gases that stand-alone systems have to consume for fuel, Martinez says. “Everything that is coming out of the process is being utilized in an integrated facility,” she says.
ExxonMobil has a joint venture with the pyrolysis firm Agilyx, called Cyclyx International, that is dedicated to finding feedstock for the plant. ExxonMobil is exploring optical sorting and advanced analytics to manage the large amounts of material that will be headed there. “You can’t support that with hand sortation,” Martinez says.
If a large oil and chemical company like ExxonMobil can operate the process successfully at large scale, it will be the ultimate refutation of pyrolysis naysayers. The company aims to roll out the technology at plants around the world to reach a goal of recycling 500,000 tons of plastics annually by the end of 2026.
“We know that scale, and being able to do this globally, is really going to be the key to ultimate success,” Martinez says. “It’s not just the technical aspects of processing plastic waste. We know that’s achievable and doable. It’s scale that will be meaningful and providing a solution to society.”