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THE DELUSION OF ADVANCED PLASTIC RECYCLING USING PYROLYSIS  
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Lisa Song, Illustrations by Max Guther, special to ProPublica
June 20, 2024
Propublica
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_ The world is drowning in plastic. Experts say we need to stop
making so much. But the plastics industry peddling a "solution" that
works like magic. Don't be fooled. _

Selling a Mirage, Max Guther

 

View this article on the original website with full illustrations
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_ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign
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Last year, I became obsessed with a plastic cup.

It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into
lunch boxes. And it was the first product I’d seen born of what’s
being touted as a cure for a crisis.

Plastic doesn’t break down in nature. If you turned all of what’s
been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe
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It’s piling up, leaching into our water
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our bodies
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Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world
churns out 430 million metric tons each year.

But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and
chemical companies, have worked since the 1980s to spin the pollution
as a failure of waste management
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— one that can be solved with recycling.

Industry leaders knew then
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what we know now: Traditional recycling would
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put a dent in the trash heap
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It’s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or
to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.

Now, the industry is heralding nothing short of a miracle: an
“advanced”type of recycling known as pyrolysis — “pyro”
means fire and “lysis” means separation. It uses heat to break
plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks.

While old-school, “mechanical” recycling yields plastic that’s
degraded or contaminated, this type of “chemical” recycling
promises plastic that behaves like it’s new, and could usher in what
the industry casts as a green revolution: Not only would it save
hard-to-recycle plastics like frozen food wrappers from the dumpster,
but it would turn them into new products that can replace the old ones
and be chemically recycled again and again.

So when three companies used ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology
to successfully conjure up that fruit cup, they announced it to the
world
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“This is a significant milestone,” said Printpack, which turned
the plastic into cups. The fruit supplier Pacific Coast Producers
called it “the most important initiative a consumer-packaged goods
company can pursue.”

“ExxonMobil is supporting the circularity of plastics,” the August
2023 news release said, citing a
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that implies an infinite loop of using, recycling and reusing.

They were so proud, I hoped they would tell me all about how they made
the cup, how many of them existed and where I could buy one.

Let’s take a closer look at that Printpack press release, which uses
convoluted terms to describe the recycled plastic in that fruit cup:

“30% ISCC PLUS certified-circular”

“mass balance free attribution”

It’s easy to conclude the cup was made with 30% recycled plastic —
until you break down the numerical sleight of hand that props up that
number.

It took interviews with a dozen academics, consultants,
environmentalists and engineers to help me do just that.

Stick with me as I unravel it all.

So began my long — and, well, circular — pursuit of the truth at a
time when it really matters.

This year, nearly all of the world’s countries are hammering out a
United Nations treaty to deal with the plastic crisis
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As they consider limiting production, the industry is making a hard
push to shift the conversation
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to the wonders of chemical recycling. It’s also buying ads during
cable news shows as U.S. states consider laws to limit plastic
packaging and lobbying federal agencies to loosen the very definition
of what it means to recycle.

It’s been selling governments on chemical recycling, with quite a
bit of success. American and European regulators
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spent tens of
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subsidizing pyrolysis facilities
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Half of all U.S. states
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have eased air pollution rules
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for the process, which has been found to release carcinogens like
benzene and dioxins
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and give off more greenhouse gases than making plastic from crude oil
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Given the high stakes of this moment, I set out to understand exactly
what the world is getting out of this recycling technology. For
months, I tracked press releases, interviewed experts, tried to buy
plastic made via pyrolysis and learned more than I ever wanted to know
about the science of recycled molecules.

Under all the math and engineering, I found an inconvenient truth: Not
much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the
plastic crisis.

Not now. Maybe not ever.

In traditional recycling, plastic is turned into tiny pellets or
flakes, which you can melt again and mold back into recycled plastic
products.

Even in a real-life scenario, where bottles have labels and a little
bit of juice left in them, most of the plastic products that go into
the process find new life.

The numbers are much lower for pyrolysis.

It’s “very, very, very, very difficult” to break down plastic
that way, said Steve Jenkins, vice president of chemicals consulting
at Wood Mackenzie, an energy and resources analytics firm. “The laws
of nature and the laws of physics are trying to stop you.”

Waste is heated until it turns into oil. Part of that oil is composed
of a liquid called naphtha, which is essential for making plastic.

There are two ingredients in the naphtha that recyclers want to
isolate: propylene and ethylene — gases that can be turned into
solid plastics.

To split the naphtha into different chemicals, it’s fed into a
machine called a steam cracker. Less than half of what it spits out
becomes propylene and ethylene.

This means that if a pyrolysis operator started with 100 pounds of
plastic waste, it can expect to end up with 15-20 pounds of reusable
plastic. Experts told me the process can yield less if the plastic
used is dirty or more if the technology is particularly advanced.

I reached out to several companies to ask how much new plastic their
processes actually yield, and none provided numbers. The American
Chemistry Council, the nation’s largest plastic lobby, told me that
because so many factors impact a company’s yield, it’s impossible
to estimate that number for the entire industry.

With mechanical recycling, it’s hard to make plastic that’s 100%
recycled; it’s expensive to do, and the process degrades plastic.
Recycled pellets are often combined with new pellets to make stuff
that’s 25% or 50% recycled, for example.

But far less recycled plastic winds up in products made through
pyrolysis.

That’s because the naphtha created using recycled plastic is
contaminated. Manufacturers add all kinds of chemicals to make
products bend or keep them from degrading in the sun.

Recyclers can overpower them by heavily diluting the recycled naphtha.
With what, you ask? Nonrecycled naphtha made from ordinary crude oil!

This is the quiet — and convenient — part of the industry’s
revolutionary pyrolysis method: It relies heavily on extracting fossil
fuels. At least 90% of the naphtha used in pyrolysis is fossil fuel
naphtha. Only then can it be poured into the steam cracker to separate
the chemicals that make plastic.

So at the end of the day, nothing that comes out of pyrolysis
physically contains more than 10% recycled material (though experts
and studies have shown that, in practice, it’s more like 5% or 2%).

Ten percent doesn’t look very impressive. Some consumers are willing
to pay a premium for sustainability
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so companies use a form of accounting called mass balance to inflate
the recycled-ness of their products. It’s not unlike offset schemes
I’ve uncovered that absolve refineries of their carbon emissions
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and enable mining companies to kill chimpanzees
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Industry-affiliated groups like the International Sustainability and
Carbon Certification write the rules. (ISCC didn’t respond to
requests for comment.)

To see how this works, let’s take a look at what might happen to a
batch of recycled naphtha. Let’s say the steam cracker splits the
batch into 100 pounds of assorted ingredients.

There are many flavors of this kind of accounting. Another version of
free attribution would allow the company to take that entire 30-pound
batch of “33% recycled” pouches and split them even further:

A third of them, 10 pounds, could be labeled 100% recycled —
shifting the value of the full batch onto them — so long as the
remaining 20 pounds aren’t labeled as recycled at all.

As long as you avoid double counting, Jenkins told me, you can
attribute the full value of recycled naphtha to the products that will
make the most money. Companies need that financial incentive to recoup
the costs of pyrolysis, he said.

But it’s hard to argue that this type of marketing is transparent.
Consumers aren’t going to parse through the caveats of a 33%
recycled claim or understand how the green technology they’re being
sold perpetuates the fossil fuel industry. I posed the critiques to
the industry, including environmentalists’ accusations that mass
balance is just a fancy way of greenwashing.

The American Chemistry Council told me it’s impossible to know
whether a particular ethylene molecule comes from pyrolysis naphtha or
fossil fuel naphtha; the compounds produced are “fungible” and can
be used for multiple products, like making rubber, solvents and paints
that would reduce the amount of new fossil fuels needed. Its statement
called mass balance a “well-known methodology” that’s been used
by other industries including fair trade coffee, chocolate and
renewable energy.

Legislation in the European Union already forbids free attribution,
and leaders are debating whether to allow other forms of mass balance.
U.S. regulation is far behind that, but as the Federal Trade
Commission revises its general guidelines for green marketing, the
industry is arguing that mass balance is crucial to the future of
advanced recycling. “The science of advanced recycling simply does
not support any other approach because the ability to track individual
molecules does not readily exist,” said a comment from ExxonMobil
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If you think navigating the ins and outs of pyrolysis is hard, try
getting your hands on actual plastic made through it.

It’s not as easy as going to the grocery store. Those water bottles
you might see with 100% recycled claims are almost certainly made
through traditional recycling. The biggest giveaway is that the labels
don’t contain the asterisks or fine print typical of products made
through pyrolysis, like “mass balance,” “circular” or
“certified.”

When I asked about the fruit cup, ExxonMobil directed me to its
partners. Printpack didn’t respond to my inquiries. Pacific Coast
Producers told me it was “engaged in a small pilot pack of plastic
bowls that contain post-consumer content with materials certified”
by third parties, and that it “has made no label claims regarding
these cups and is evaluating their use.”

I pressed the American Chemistry Council for other examples.

“Chemical recycling is a proven technology that is already
manufacturing products, conserving natural resources, and offering the
potential to dramatically improve recycling rates,” said Matthew
Kastner, a media relations director. His colleague added that much of
the plastic made via pyrolysis is “being used for food- and
medical-grade packaging, oftentimes not branded.”

They provided links to products including a Chevron Phillips Chemical
announcement about bringing recycled plastic food wrapping to retail
stores
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“For competitive reasons,” a Chevron spokesperson declined to
discuss brand names, the product’s availability or the amount
produced.

In another case, a grocery store chain sold chicken wrapped in plastic
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made by ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis process. The producers told me they
were part of a small project that’s now discontinued.

In the end, I ran down half a dozen claims about products that came
out of pyrolysis; each either existed in limited quantities or had its
recycled-ness obscured with mass balance caveats.

Then this April, nearly eight months after I’d begun my pursuit, I
could barely contain myself when I got my hands on an actual product.

I was at a United Nations treaty negotiation in Ottawa, Ontario, and
an industry group had set up a nearby showcase. On display was a case
of Heinz baked beans, packaged in “39% recycled plastic*.” (The
asterisk took me down an online rabbit hole about certification and
circularity. Heinz didn’t respond to my questions.)

This, too, was part of an old trial. The beans were expired.

Pyrolysis is a “fairy tale,” I heard from Neil Tangri, the science
and policy director at the environmental justice network Global
Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. He said he’s been hearing
pyrolysis claims since the ’90s but has yet to see proof it works as
promised.

“If anyone has cracked the code for a large-scale, efficient and
profitable way to turn plastic into plastic,” he said, “every
reporter in the world” would get a tour.

If I did get a tour, I wondered, would I even see all of that
stubborn, dirty plastic they were supposedly recycling?

The industry’s marketing implied we could soon toss sandwich bags
and string cheese wrappers into curbside recycling bins, where they
would be diverted to pyrolysis plants. But I grew skeptical as I
watched a webinar for ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology, the
kind used to make the fruit cup. The company showed photos of plastic
packaging and oil field equipment as examples of its starting material
but then mentioned something that made me sit up straight: It was
using pre-consumer plastic to “give consistency” to the waste
stream.

Chemical plants need consistency, so it’s easier to use plastic that
hasn’t been gunked up by consumer use, Jenkins explained.

But plastic waste that had never been touched by consumers, such as
industrial scrap found at the edges of factory molds, could easily be
recycled the old-fashioned way. Didn’t that negate the need for this
more polluting, less efficient process?

I asked ExxonMobil how much post-consumer plastic it was actually
using. Catie Tuley, a media relations adviser, said it depends on
what’s available. “At the end of the day, advanced recycling
allows us to divert plastic waste from landfills and give new life to
plastic waste.”

I posed the same question to several other operators. A company in
Europe told me it uses “mixed post-consumer, flexible plastic
waste” and does not recycle pre-consumer waste.

But this spring at an environmental journalism conference, an American
Chemistry Council executive confirmed the industry’s preference for
clean plastic as he talked about an Atlanta-based company and its
pyrolysis process. My colleague Sharon Lerner asked whether it was
sourcing curbside-recycled plastic for pyrolysis.

If Nexus Circular had a “magic wand,” it would, he acknowledged,
but right now that kind of waste “isn’t good enough.” He added,
“It’s got tomatoes in it.”

(Nexus later confirmed that most of the plastic it used was
pre-consumer and about a third was post-consumer, including motor oil
containers sourced from car repair shops and bags dropped off at
special recycling centers.)

Clean, well-sorted plastic is a valuable commodity. If the chemical
recycling industry grows, experts told me, those companies could end
up competing with the far more efficient traditional recycling.

To spur that growth, the American Chemistry Council is lobbying for
mandates that would require more recycled plastic in packaging; it
wants to make sure that chemically recycled plastic counts. “This
would create market-driven demand signals,” Kastner told me, and
ease the way for large-scale investment in new chemical recycling
plants.

I asked Jenkins, the energy industry analyst, to play out this
scenario on a larger scale.

Were all of these projects adding up? Could the industry conceivably
make enough propylene and ethylene through pyrolysis to replace much
of our demand for new plastic?

He looked three years into the future, using his company’s latest
figures on global pyrolysis investment, and gave an optimistic
assessment.

At best, the world could replace 0.2% of new plastic churned out in a
year with products made through pyrolysis.

_LISA SONG reports on the environment, energy and climate change for
ProPublica._

_Graphics and development by Lucas Waldron
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development by Anna Donlan
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Sandoval
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research._

_PROPUBLICA is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces
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* plastics
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* plastics industry
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