Chemical recycling could dramatically reduce the amount of tricky waste ending up in the ocean and other inappropriate locations in the future, a report has claimed.
The Ocean Recovery Alliance study found that the nascent process could handle 70 per cent of hard-to-recycle discarded plastic from packaging and textiles that would otherwise be mismanaged in 2040.
The report, Towards Circular Plastics, forecast that 75m tonnes of such tricky material was likely to arise that year.
It said 31m tonnes of this could be mismanaged unless chemical recycling could be harnessed. Non-governmental organisation Ocean Recovery Alliance found that 22m tonnes could be handled by the process in “an ideal scenario”.
This assumed that appropriate collection and sorting infrastructure was in place in 15 years’ time, and that mechanical recycling was used for easy-to-recycle plastic.
It also relied upon “future technology developments” to improve chemical recycling’s ability to deal with impurities, and did not consider the economic viability of the process “or other limitations”.
Plastics Europe last year insisted a rollout of chemical recycling was “essential” to meet targets for reuse of material in new items.
But The Bureau of International Recycling subsequently warned that the technology needed careful consideration and “well-informed, market-based policies” to ensure it did not push out traditional methods.
