Circularity Concepts - Advanced Recycling Technologies

there have been some concerns expressed by ngos over environmental performance and just recently we have some more studies including one from the closed loop partners looking at some of the issues around both climate impacts water impacts and toxicity and then we'll just close with some of the top lines out of this so with that i think we're ready to get going there's a lot of confusion over what is advanced recycling we use the terms advanced recycling molecular recycling and chemical recycling synonymously and they do mean pretty much the same things but they can be used differently i think chemical recycling is typically associated with what we call conversion technologies many of which have been around for many many years but when we use the term advanced recycling we're really talking about a very diverse suite of technologies some that can regenerate polymers others break polymers down to different components whether it's monomers or intermediates and they can be used to create new plastics fuels or other hydrocarbon based products so i don't think that there is a definition of how we consider these technologies but the way i think about them is really defining them by the products that they produce and the degree to which polymers are decomposed so if you look at this graphic and go from left to right you'll see as we go across those green circles you have increasing degrees of decomposition with the various technologies and those little sort of light blue boxes give you some sense of the types of technologies that are associated so if we look at purification for instance we have solvent and non-solvent-based purification technologies these do not break any polymer chains they simply purify the polymer so it removes additives color and styles and it creates a like virgin polymer that can then be extruded and go right back into production it's a relatively new area it had been around in the past but there were some concerns around the toxicity of solvents so what we've seen recently is some real innovation and improvements on these types of technologies then we get into decomposition and this is where there's a really broad range of technologies but what they particularly do is break polymers down into their monomers or chemical intermediates and that could mean slightly longer chains so there is a real diverse range of technologies under this category of decomposition some of them are chemical based like methanolysis and glycolysis others are what we more traditionally think about chemical recycling like paralysis can be under here because certain polymers under paralysis will yield their monomers and then we have some microwave or very selective decomposition type of technologies as well then we move to conversion and this is really where i think historically there have been concerns over conversion technologies most of them come out of the petrochemical industry paralysis and gasification have been around for 100 years they're quite well understood but their application to plastics is relatively new then we have some innovation in this area as well things using hydrothermal processes using supercritical water these break the polymers down into their very fundamental c fractions or what we call their hydrocarbon fractions and that can be either in liquid form or they can create syn gases which are very elemental but those are the foundations of creating new hydrocarbons so what you can see on the upside of those green circles is the types of products that can go back into new plastics and then the products that can come out either as fuels as hydrocarbon products like waxes or in some cases they're just petrochemical intermediates so let's just talk about a few things about what differentiates advanced recycling from mechanical recycling they're quite diverse and we see more technologies coming up all the time including some that are enzymatic so we have some really interesting green chemistry types of technologies however there is a legacy perception particularly in the ngo community that's very negative around chemical recycling and that's particularly things like gasification and paralysis where they liken it to incineration however these are not combustion or incineration processes you are maintaining the molecules of the material but it depends on where they go if they go into fuel then yes they will be combusted but if it goes back into the value chain for plastics then we are in fact keeping those molecules in circulation so today there aren't a lot of commercial scale operations and when i say commercial we're talking about things on the scale of 100 000 metric tons or larger however you can see i was reviewing a paper by rabobank they think that there's going to be a huge amount of growth in this area they're predicting up to 140 new facilities by 2025 with the capacity between three and four million metric tons a year so that's a global statistic the scale of these technologies relative to mechanical tends to be quite large they're capital intensive and as you move to that right hand side of the chart around conversion you either have to have an off-take partner who can take those hydrocarbon products and put them into a refinery or you need to be part of an integrated facility and that is actually a very interesting area to look at because there's a lot of efficiency integrated petrochemical processes the one thing about them is that they are really focusing on hard to recycle plastics and formats and when i say formats that could be things like sachets and pouches or it could be apparel durable goods and formats that we typically don't see either in municipal collection or going through a mirv so they sort of open the door on possibilities for what we could recover however they also are typically looking for low to no cost feedstocks unlike mechanical they have to be looking you know the cost of feed stock they're very sensitive to however in some areas where there's supportive policy they may be paid a gate fee to take these hard to recycle materials so that really influences the business model in almost all cases they have to pre-process their feed stocks which adds both capital and o m cost to the system now there are some technologies particularly in europe that are buying pre-processed but then you're paying for that so there's a really interesting interview with the head of sustainability at the science med group and he was talking about how challenging he thinks advanced recycling technologies are going to be in southeast asia principally because of the lack of support of policy the lack of source segregation and the state of collection infrastructure today and i think as we go through this presentation we will sort of talk about those themes we don't really know that the economics are unproven at this point however we do have really good insights on what influences the economics of them and as i just suggested the policy environment in which a technology is being placed will have a lot to do with their economics if you're getting paid a gate fee versus having to purchase feedstock that obviously has a big influence on your overall economics so when you get into the middle of this chart you'll see the feedstock transformation and output those are the typical generic steps for any advanced recycling technology they're not so different than mechanical recycling but what you see is that the reliability and quality and the cost of feed stocks to have a lot to do with the overall economics and what we see is that this is probably one of the biggest linchpins as technologies look to move into different markets they have to find reliable quality supply at the right price point and then there's a question around how much pre-processing do they need so a lot of paralysis operations they will have a mini murf in front of the operation to make sure there's no metals they don't want pet in there and then they will densify or in sometimes pulverize the material before it goes into the reactor so the more surface area there is the faster the reaction time but that depends on the type of technology so this is where you have capex and opex considerations and scale the scale really has a big competitive impact as well as yield so the quality of what goes in has a lot to do with what your overall yield will be on the outside for me that yield question just like a mechanical recycling is a really important factor on the overall economics if i have to buy a ton of material but my yield is only 75 then 25 of that is not giving me product so we see yields on some as high as 98 percent and then we also see somewhere yields are as low as 70 and then the output side is really around what products are they intending to produce are they really addressing plastic market fuels or alternative products we have some companies who are actually creating new feed stocks for new materials there's some really interesting technologies that they could even come out of plastics but make things like a synthetic nutrient so there are different types of products that can be made all sorts of different types of post-processing depending on what the process is producing i mentioned already that if you aren't an integrated facility you may need an off taker so that makes a slightly more complicated supply chain so i thought you guys might be interested in seeing where there are existing and proposed projects in asia irs has done a ton of research at this area over the last several years and then this rabba bank report i think what's really clear is india and japan really need in terms of the most commercial advanced recycling technologies and those that are commercial tend to be focused on p-e-t you know they're glycolysis processes this is a a type of decomposition and the other ones are paralysis and then what we see is a lot of interest but not necessarily commercial technologies in other parts of asia so you'll see i tried to distinguish between sort of small pilots versus commercial versus there was just simply an announcement made on the right hand side that gives you a good sense of that so even with all these announcements we're not seeing commercial scale facilities yet in southeast asia and i just wanted to give this example like the the scion cement group has a paralysis pilot but it's 4 000 kilotons a year and then environmental solutions in singapore has a 20 000 kiloton facility but i don't think it's at full capacity yet so in the world of plastics this is very small and we don't have scale yet and without scale we're not really going to truly understand what the economics are and i want to just mention that is not comprehensive there's a lot more projects than that this is um based on a chart in that closed loop report on transitioning to a circular economy where there's this nice analysis that shows the scope of materials that can be addressed by advanced recycling technologies but also where they are in terms of their commercial development it was a really complex chart so i tried to break it down for you a little bit to show you how we open the door that pale gray box in the upper left those are the things that we have scaled well established mechanical recycling processes for pretty much globally although hdpe is a little less robust in certain parts of the world but that's really the backbone of mechanical recycling what advanced recycling technologies are doing is opening the door to new resins and new formats and so you can see that we have rigid polypropylene we have polyolefin films that's the pe and pp films that includes things that's a face mask so we call those non-wovens we have technologies that can address polystyrene and expanded polystyrene multi-laminates and we're also now seeing some really interesting things around textiles particularly cotton and polyester which represent a huge portion of the overall apparel industry as well as technologies that can take mixed plastics and when you can take mixed plastics that really reduces the pressure on the need for really precise segregation so on the right hand side it shows you the green are things where these are developing technologies with commercial examples in the marketplace the bright blue is where the technologies appear to be feasible and they're usually in demonstration phase and so the products on the right are broken out that way so the point of this is that they have the promise of opening the universe of recoverable plastics which is really important as we think about trying to achieve a circular economy so this is just a bit more of a riff on that but looking at what is the relationship between mechanical advanced recycling and how should we really be thinking about these do they compete do they complement my point of view is that they're complementary that mechanical recycling is really well tuned for these rigid plastics that are typically easy to identify and collect pets hds it could even include pp but they need segregated streams these are high volume well understood by consumers and mechanical recyclers the cost of these feed stocks is not at a price point that advanced recycling technologies are going to be interested in it's too high for them which is why they're looking at these other types of materials so i think non-wovens is a particularly important one now that we've all been wearing face masks for two years but non-wovens are a giant category i mean anytime you go into a hospital you'll see people completely covered in them in a clean room people are in them they have a very high melt flow index they're a very valuable polymer but to date we really have not had any way to recover this so pure cycles purification technology is opening the door to processing that category of polypropylene they can process black plastics and things that we typically don't think of like carpeting and films but these technologies do need segregated streams just like mechanical of either polypropylene or particular laminates that they might be looking at if we move into decomposition we're bringing back monomers or perhaps intermediates the types of materials are very similar to purification and similarly they need to have segregated streams so they're not going to take a mixture of plastics you're either going to do pets or nylons pa6 is a nylon or polystyrenes p-e-t is used in a lot of carpeting it's used in a lot of apparel so this is a very interesting expansion of capacity by being able to address this other grouping of polyesters that we can't easily mechanically recycle and then we move to the far side and this is where i think the term feedstock flexible was used in the closed report i really like that because this is where conversion technologies can take mixed plastics and it can also take materials that we probably may not want to mechanically recycle because they may be contaminated with pesticides oils or other fuels and durables so that means furniture tables chairs kids toys there's a lot of things that conversion would handle very well and so i know a company and they're doing a lot of gas tanks and taking stuff out of industrial sites so the whole point of this is as you move to the right we're moving into realms of plastic that when we're in the mechanical recycling world looking at packaging or what is really consumer waste it really is broadening our scope let's pivot onto why is this so important and why is it happening these are statistics you all are probably very familiar with the left side of this is a chart we did of roland guyer's data from the production use and fade of all plastics ever made and i think it's really helpful to see when you look at the thick lines under the sector consumption you can see how big packaging is and how short the duration is and it just kind of gives you the context about why we need to address some of these areas but you'll see there are a lot of them like consumer and institutional that's a pretty short time frame too textiles is only five years so we have a lot of short-term products out there as well as a big pool of durables out there that we need to address and as we look forward in time the plastic industry is huge and it's just getting huger faster and this is not just a material issue but it's a climate issue because if we keep extracting virgin resources new plastic you can see the projection in 2030 the emissions from the plastic industry would be equivalent to 295 new coal burning power plants and our planet just simply cannot afford that so we have these very fast moving plastics are growing really rapidly driven largely by emerging economies and we don't have scaled interventions yet we have mechanical recycling but it is not at the scale with which we produce plastic and that's what we have to think about especially as we look at ocean plastic issues and mismanagement issues so some of these hard to recycle materials so 11 million metric tons of plastics enter the ocean every year 46 of that is what we would call hard to recycle plastics films wraps sachets bags and so the question is how do we get that back and i think that's where we have to be thinking that advanced recycling maybe can provide a solution for that i've had some interesting conversations recently where i think people did not really understand the role that the circular economy was playing in driving advanced recycling technologies so you all are probably familiar with the macarthur foundation and their plastic packs which are really their implementation platform for the new plastic economy and this circular economy vision for plastic packaging in particular it has a really important role in harmonizing goals globally and also driving policy that's supportive of bringing materials keeping plastics in circulation but one of the things it has is it's driving recycled content goals and i'm going to show you some charts in a second that just show you these content goals are very much driving advanced recycling technologies today their basics are we need to eliminate unnecessary and problematic packaging through redesign and innovation move from single use to reuse plastic packaging should be reusable recyclable or compostable and we need to increase the reuse collection and recycling so this is having a huge impact globally in every market we have been looking at the chart on the lower right is a broader context it's focused on pe only but the bars show you the demand for recycled materials recycled p e in terms of million metric tons and then the lines are the percentage of recycled as a percentage of total demand so we really are underperforming on the recycling side to really meet what we have for demand i mean the math is 15 this is why we need all tools in the toolbox to address this and i'm showing you this because this just shows you the opportunity the gray is the opportunity so this is not looking at only packaging or anything this is the overall plastic recycling rate and if we want to address virgin production we have to address these gray bars because otherwise they're being replaced by virgin material every year and i think it's important to keep that big context because we can tend to look at recycling rates like pet bottles well in the scope of all things it's important but we have all this other stuff we need to do as well mechanical recycling is clearly the most direct path it's going to be the most efficient path but it only addresses a portion of all plastic packaging and products so a couple of things need to change to grow our solution set and part of it is mechanical recycling has typically been a low-cost alternative to virgin and the vast majority of plastics are down cycled into applications with less rigorous requirements in packaging so we put it in textiles pipe or lumber that model is not sufficient to build a circular economy we need policies that are going to incentivize collection education infrastructure and help us scale whatever technologies mechanical or or but we also need disincentives we cannot have cheap or no cost disposal and we need to disincentivize the use of urgent resources so part of this is we have to increase the scope and scale and we have to shift the business model so we need to move into higher grade higher value and markets that value pcr and willing to pay for it the things that come to mind are like packaging apparel could be electronics or other things and that is happening i think we're starting to see that but we need it to accelerate so this is where i think advanced recycling technologies perhaps this is their role so i think that when scaled they can complement and then one very important way in that they can help address that unmet portion of plastics we're not addressing today they can fill in the gap where we have technical barriers to mechanical recycling they can address the physical the color odor and physical degradation that build up in mechanical recycled plastics that if we want to keep them so we recycle the bottle seven times and which point it starts to get pretty gray and doesn't look so great advanced recycling can actually upgrade that material so it's just like virgin and then goes back into production without having to extract virgin resources that i think is really important to keep in mind is that big system picture so the chart on the left this is from ihs markets they've done some scenario planning looking at what happens if business is usual the green line is the demand for virgin plastic through 2050 and then what you see underneath it is in green is mechanical recycling displacing virgin you have markets that are durable markets that are big demand sinks like lumber asphalt chemical recycling is that little purple line and then you can see landfill and then there's a giant gap between that and and the virgin line that assumes we just keep going on as we are scenario b is there is a step change in social and political attitudes towards energy climate in the environment so this is policies it's prioritizing climate and at the same time disincentivizing the demand for virgin hydrocarbons and you can see how long that time frame is and that's talking about revolutionary change but it does significantly close that gap you'll see you know landfill and energy recovery is still a big portion of this but it does accelerate it pretty substantially i mean it goes from 20 to slightly over 50 percent so you can see how important policy is as well as i think the education of policy makers and citizens on how important this is it's not going to solve it but it starts to play a big role in it i will tell you that one of the very discouraging things is how long it takes for policy you can pass but it can take five years before it's implemented so that is another issue that we have to face so i just wanted to talk about the challenges are very similar for mechanical and advanced recycling it kind of lumped them by general challenges you know you need source segregated feedstock collection of plastics today sort of globally is not scaled to our use to the scale of use we typically collect only limited forms we have a real challenge with consumers it's just all plastic they don't really differentiate they might differentiate between a bag and a bottle but they're not differentiating between p e t and polyethylene then this is the question that was brought up around sachets the economics of collecting films and flexibles because they are so light they're incredibly resource efficient in terms of delivering goods but on the back end they are really challenging so this is where i think policy is going to play a really important role some additional challenges for advanced recycling is the scale the volume that they're looking for and you can't turn these facilities off they need to have that material coming in the door all the time they're also targeting polymers that are not collected in today's typical systems so there's got to be some growth in that area so i think that is important for context but i did want to just touch on the environmental performance issues because this is an area that it's a real sticking point where the entire class of advanced recycling technologies is getting judged by legacy performance of paralysis from 35 years ago i think the technologies i've reviewed they have done a lot of work on improving their environmental performance they're really thinking about it they have to comply with all air regulations but like any industrial process if it's not well run it's not going to perform well so it's not just the technology but it's the operator is really really critical in this the recent lcas have come out showing that they have a greenhouse gas benefit it's not insubstantial it's 40 39 in a market like the us where we typically landfill plastics so there's no carbon impact however when you move to a market that incinerates plastic the benefit of these technologies is really realized because if we're burning plastic we're putting all that carbon up into the atmosphere so we do see environmental benefit and i think that the volume of information around these technologies is really growing so the key takeaways are the plastic industry is growing dramatically over the next few decades and we have to address and reduce the use of virgin plastics not all advanced recycling technologies are the same we really need to look at them independently evaluate them and regulate them independently these technologies have that potential to grow the universe of recovered plastics and upgrade not only hard to recycle plastics but degraded mechanically recycled plastic so we can keep a big pool in circulation there is growing evidence that there is both carbon environmental benefits to these technologies they are not the same for all but they're there it's still a very nascent industry we have a lot of questions still about how things are going to roll out but we expect a lot of growth over the next decade the biggest challenges to that growth are finding the supply reliable volumes of quality feedstock and demonstrating the business model and that's where policy really plays a role policy can be supportive or it can be a real challenge and i think this is local infrastructure this i'm really talking about collection and policy they're going to play a big role on how fast the adoption and effectiveness of these technologies roll out

2022-04-29 20:46

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