By Brentan Alexander, PhD, Chief Science Officer & Chief Commercial Officer and Brad Price, Principal Engineer

 

The last decade has seen a notable increase in public awareness of the severe impact created by the dumping of waste plastics in the environment. Images of trash covered beaches and videos of wildlife injured by plastic pollution have provided compelling visual evidence that our single-use economy is quite literally trashing our planet. Governments are starting to respond to the problem, with strategies ranging from plastic product bans to taxes, and technologies aimed at enabling circular plastics are coming to market. Enabling this transition to a circular economy requires the cooperation of the large chemical companies that make the vast majority of our plastics, and most are already on board.

It’s natural to scoff at the notion that these large multinational producers of plastic materials are a core part of a circular future. These companies, such as Chevon Phillips Chemical, Dow, and SABIC, can either directly trace their formation back to fossil-oil companies or have significant collaborations with fossil-oil interests. They’ve also used many of the same dirty tricks from the oil and gas industry: In 2020, NPR and PBS Frontline published an investigation detailing the efforts by the plastics industry in the 1980s to improve the image of plastics by adopting the now-ubiquitous three-arrow recycling triangle, despite the fact that the industry was well aware that the actual recycling of the plastic itself was either economically unviable or technically unfeasible. The parallels to the climate-denialism of the oil majors, wherein Exxon and others actively discouraged, hid, or obfuscated the evidence of human-caused climate change, are obvious.

The drive to enable circular plastics, however, is fundamentally different than the efforts to decarbonize our energy system and eliminate fossil fuels. Changing from coal, oil, and natural gas to renewable energy sources represents a fundamental attack on the future of the fossil energy majors. Circular plastics, on the other hand, are entirely compatible with the business models of the chemical giants: They take a hydrocarbon feedstock and use petrochemical processes to make plastic pellets. Switching from a fossil-derived hydrocarbon feedstock to a feedstock derived from chemically recycled plastics is no change at all. These companies have no threat of stranded assets, major business pivots, or substantial facility redesigns. To the contrary, the rapidly expanding demand for recycled plastic material represents a business opportunity for these companies on which they are eager to capitalize. The better analogy is the Montreal Protocol, in which refrigerant manufacturers that made ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were central to enabling a new generation of chemicals without the same destructive impact. These companies were happy to sell a new class of refrigerants that didn’t damage the ozone layer because they were already in the business of selling refrigerants. So too are plastic manufactures fully aligned with a future built on recycled plastics.

The proof that the shift is underway can be found in the public releases of these major corporations. SABIC, Saudi Arabia’s national petrochemical company, is already selling circular plastic material at commercial scale under the TrueCircle™ brand name through its partnership with Plastic Energy. Construction is underway at Eastman Chemical’s $300+ million dollar facility to chemically recycle PET, which is expected to start up in 2022. Recent patent applications and announcements reveal that ExxonMobil is developing its own proprietary process for waste plastic pyrolysis. Chevron Phillips Chemical (CPChem), the joint venture between Chevron and Phillips 66, has entered into supply agreements with three separate startups commercializing waste plastic pyrolysis technologies. And the largest waste plastic pyrolysis plant in the world from Brightmark (an NER client) is nearing completion in Ashley, Indiana, with more larger plants on the way.

These companies aren’t spending hundreds of millions of dollars because they have suddenly become responsible environmental stewards. Rather, their investments are being driven by a changing regulatory and market environment that is providing the economic driver needed to make these investments pay off. Maine recently signed an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) bill into law that places the financial responsibility for recycling programs on the producers of plastic packaging. Other states are considering minimum recycled content mandates to require the use of recycled plastic material. Similar laws are under consideration in statehouses across the country. In the European Union, the most ambitious and impactful program came into force on January 1, 2021, when the bloc implemented an €0.80 per kilogram tax on non-recycled plastic waste.

These companies are anticipating further market growth as more regulatory programs are put in place. This doesn’t make chemical corporations full allies of the environmental movement, especially since some proposed policies will impact their bottom line. For starters, their motivations include the continued growth in plastic production globally and ever-increasing rates of plastic usage. For the developing world most impacted by plastic pollution and waste, plastics made from recycled materials pollute the beach just the same. Policies that address plastic pollution do not fully overlap with those that encourage waste plastic recycling.  In many cases, plastics should be replaced by more environmentally friendly materials, an outcome that the plastics manufacturers will surely fight to avoid.

But eliminating plastic waste by eliminating plastics is not a reasonable or realizable goal. Plastics improve our quality of life, they are physically resilient, relatively low cost (even with the additional costs associated with circular material), have a wide range of uses and applications, and they perform better than competing materials. They are not going to go away. Successfully dealing with plastic’s environmental impact requires enabling circularity for the plastics that will continue to be used in our modern economy. Achieving this goal doesn’t require slaying the plastic behemoths. Instead, the fastest route to circularity lies with them—despite their checkered environmental record—and governmental policies, which need cultivation to fully enable the circular plastic revolution.

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