A New Report Calls Chemical Recycling a ‘Dangerous Deception’ — And a Former Plastic Lobbyist Agrees
Joseph Winters | November 1, 2023 | Grist
As petrochemical companies continue to inundate the world with cheap plastic products and packaging — much of which is designed to be used once and then thrown away — they’ve been heavily promoting one solution called “chemical recycling.”
This catch-all term refers to processes and technologies that break plastics into their molecular building blocks and turn them into new products. In theory, chemical recycling is a promising way to deal with so-called “hard-to-recycle” plastics like wrappers and bags, which can’t be recycled using conventional methods.
But a new report from the nonprofits Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN, says chemical recycling is a “dangerous deception” that will only exacerbate pollution and environmental injustice while failing to address the plastics crisis.
“The landscape of chemical recycling is littered with pollution and failure,” and relying on it is an “unreliable and polluting approach” to resolve the global plastics crisis, Jennifer Congdon, Beyond Plastics’ deputy director, told journalists at a press conference on Tuesday. She and the report co-authors called on President Joe Biden to place a national moratorium on new chemical recycling operations in the U.S. and urged international negotiators to disavow the process as part of the global plastics treaty that will be discussed during a third round of negotiations in Nairobi later this month.
Beyond Plastics and IPEN’s 159-page report begins with an overview of the plastic pollution crisis and companies’ “undeniable” failure to address it through conventional recycling methods. According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. plastics recycling rate is still only about 5 percent, despite decades spent trying to scale it up.
Notably, this view is supported in a foreword by Lewis Freeman, former vice president of government affairs for the Society of the Plastics Industry — a major lobbying group that in 2016 changed its name to the Plastics Industry Association. According to Freeman, the plastics industry has long known that recycling “couldn’t realistically manage a significant amount of plastic waste,” but has “spent millions of dollars convincing the public otherwise.” Freeman implies that chemical recycling is an extension of this deception and raises doubts that it will contribute to an industry target of “reusing, recycling or recovering 100 percent of plastic packaging in the U.S. by 2040.”
The Plastics Industry Association did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
