This new industry landscape overview published by Zero Waste Europe, “Fifty years: chemical recycling’s fading promise”, calls for a reduction in virgin plastic production to prioritise upstream solutions to single-use plastic that, ultimately, reduce plastic consumption at large. These include waste prevention, reuse, and then recycling.
In the paper, contacted experts, including former Shell scientist Prof. Jean-Paul Lange, warn that pyrolysis relies on continued virgin plastic production. According to Lange, it will take fifty years to “successfully ramp up chemical recycling”.
Even if scaled up, pyrolysis can only process a fraction of the plastic waste produced, and cannot be considered fully circular. Some major petrochemical companies like Shell and ExxonMobil are quietly backing away from investments in chemical recycling technologies due to doubts about its economic viability.
Despite this, the EU and other governments are providing significant public funding for chemical recycling projects.
The industry is lobbying for the adoption of fuel-use-exempt “mass balance” accounting, which would allow companies to claim products contain a certain percentage of recycled material, even if that percentage is not present in each individual product. There are concerns that mass balance accounting lacks transparency and could mislead consumers, leading to greenwashing.
