Special Report: The Recycling Myth: Big Oil’s solution for plastic waste littered with failure

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29/07/2021 12:00

(For more Reuters Special Reports, click on  SPECIAL/ )
    By Joe Brock, Valerie Volcovici and John Geddie
    BOISE, Idaho, July 29 (Reuters) - In early 2018, residents
of Boise, Idaho were told by city officials that a breakthrough
technology could transform their hard-to-recycle plastic waste
into low-polluting fuel. The program, backed by Dow Inc, one of
the world’s biggest plastics producers, was hailed locally as a
greener alternative to burying it in the county landfill.
    A few months later, residents of Boise and its suburbs began
stuffing their yogurt containers, cereal-box liners and other
plastic waste into special orange garbage bags, which were then
trucked more than 300 miles (483 kilometers) away, across the
state line to Salt Lake City, Utah.
    The destination was a company called Renewlogy. The startup
marketed itself as an “advanced recycling” company capable of
handling hard-to-recycle plastics such as plastic bags or
takeout containers - stuff most traditional recyclers won’t
touch. Renewlogy’s technology, company founder Priyanka Bakaya
told local media at the time, would heat plastic in a special
oxygen-starved chamber, transforming the trash into diesel fuel.
    Within a year, however, that effort ground to a halt. The
project’s failure, detailed for the first time by Reuters, shows
the enormous obstacles confronting advanced recycling, a set of
reprocessing technologies that the plastics industry is touting
as an environmental savior - and sees as key to its own
continued growth amid mounting global pressure to curb the use
of plastic.
    Renewlogy’s equipment could not process plastic “films” such
as cling wrap, as promised, Boise’s Materials Management Program
Manager Peter McCullough told Reuters. The city remains in the
recycling program, he said, but its plastic now meets a low-tech
end: It’s being trucked to a cement plant northeast of Salt Lake
City that burns it for fuel.
    Renewlogy said in an emailed response to Reuters’ questions
that it could recycle plastic films. The trouble, it said, was
that Boise’s waste was contaminated with other garbage at 10
times the level it was told to expect.
    Boise spokesperson Colin Hickman said the city was not aware
of any statements or assurances made to Renewlogy about specific
levels of contamination.
    Hefty EnergyBag, as the recycling program in Boise is known,
is a collaboration between Dow  DOW.N  and U.S. packaging firm
Reynolds Consumer Products Inc  REYN.O , maker of the program’s
orange garbage sacks and popular household goods such as Hefty
trash bags, plastic food wrap and aluminum foil. Hefty EnergyBag
said in an emailed response to questions that it “continues to
work with companies to help advance technologies that enable
other end uses for the collected plastics.” It declined to
answer questions about Renewlogy’s operations, as did Dow
spokesperson Kyle Bandlow. Reynolds did not respond to requests
for comment.
    The collapse of Boise’s advanced recycling plan is not an
isolated case. In the past two years, Reuters has learned, three
separate advanced recycling projects backed by other major
companies - in the Netherlands, Indonesia and the United States
- have been dropped or indefinitely delayed because they were
not commercially viable.  urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL8N2P47CU
    In all, Reuters examined 30 projects by two-dozen advanced
recycling companies across three continents and interviewed more
than 40 people with direct knowledge of this industry, including
plastics industry officials, recycling executives, scientists,
policymakers and analysts.
    Most of those endeavors are agreements between small
advanced recycling firms and big oil and chemical companies or
consumer brands, including ExxonMobil Corp  XOM.N , Royal Dutch
Shell Plc  RDSa.L  and Procter & Gamble Co (P&G)  PG.N . All are
still operating on a modest scale or have closed down, and more
than half are years behind schedule on previously announced
commercial plans, according to the Reuters review. Three
advanced recycling companies that have gone public in the last
year have seen their stock prices decline since their market
debuts.
    
    PLASTIC BOOM
    Many advanced recycling projects have emerged in recent
years in response to a global explosion of plastic waste. More
than 90% gets dumped or incinerated because there’s no cheap way
to repurpose it, according to a landmark 2017 study published in
the journal Science Advances.
    Not only is this garbage choking landfills and despoiling
oceans, it’s contributing to global warming because it’s made
from fossil fuels https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-plastic-recycling.
 At a time when demand for transport fuel is under pressure from
government vehicle-efficiency mandates and the rise of electric
cars, the oil industry is doubling down on plastics. Plastic
production - which industry analysts forecast to double by 2040
- will be the biggest growth market for oil  demand over the
next decade, according to the Paris-based International Energy
Agency.
    A number of U.S. and European cities have already levied
bans or consumer fees on single-use plastic bags. Pressure is
also building for “polluter-pays” laws that would shift the cost
of waste collection from taxpayers to the companies that make
and use plastic.  Earlier this month, Maine became the first
U.S. state to pass such legislation.
    Enter advanced recycling. Also known as “chemical
recycling,” advanced recycling is an umbrella term for processes
that use heat or chemicals to turn plastic waste into fuel or
reclaimed resin to make new plastic.
    The American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry group
whose membership is dominated by plastics makers, says
polluter-pays measures would hurt the economy. It’s urging U.S.
lawmakers instead to ease regulations on and provide incentives
to advanced recycling companies.
    As of July, 14 U.S. states had passed these kinds of laws.
At least $500 million in public funds has been spent since 2017
on 51 U.S. advanced recycling projects, the environmental group
Greenpeace said in a report last year. Boise’s government, for
example, has spent at least $736,000 on garbage bags for its
program, according to purchase orders and invoices between May
2018 and April 2020 obtained by Reuters through public records
requests.
    The ACC says these technologies are game-changers because
they could potentially process all types of plastic, eliminating
expensive sorting and cleaning.
    “The potential is enormous,” said Joshua Baca, vice
president of the ACC’s plastics division. The ACC this month
called on Congress to develop a national strategy to reduce
plastic waste, including “rapid scaling” of advanced recycling.
    However, the Reuters review found some advanced recycling
companies struggling with the same obstacles that have bedeviled
traditional recyclers for decades: the expense of collecting,
sorting and cleaning plastic trash, and creating end products
that can compete on price and quality with fossil fuels or
virgin plastic.
    Transitioning from the lab to the real-world chaos of dirty
and improperly sorted household plastic waste has proven too
much for some of these newcomers, said Helen McGeough, a
London-based senior plastic recycling analyst at Independent
Commodity Intelligence Services, a data and analytics firm.
    “People have entered into this, perhaps not understanding
the processes properly, the waste that they are handling, and so
that's why some things have failed,” McGeough told Reuters.
    Advanced recycling is in its infancy, and as with any
emerging technology, setbacks are to be expected, a dozen
industry players said.
    So far, some of their own research shows it’s no panacea.
    An assessment of the Hefty EnergyBag program was
commissioned by Reynolds. It compared the environmental impact
of recycling plastic waste through a heating process known as
pyrolysis - the approach Renewlogy used - to two traditional
ways of handling it: burning it in cement kilns or putting it in
a landfill.
    The study, published on the Hefty EnergyBag program’s
website last year, found that in Boise’s case, pyrolysis fared
worst among the three in terms of its overall global warming
potential. That measure estimated the greenhouse gas emissions
of the whole process, from manufacturing the garbage bags and
transporting the waste to the energy used in the recycling
process.
    A narrower analysis, looking just at the final recycling
process and its contribution to global warming, found that
pyrolysis scored better than landfilling but was worse than
burning plastic in a cement kiln.
    “These types of studies will really push the chemical
recyclers to think about their operations,” said Tad Radzinski,
president of Sustainable Solutions Corporation, the consultancy
which conducted the study.
    The study noted its calculations came from various sources,
including a U.S.-based pyrolysis plant that has experience
processing the Hefty EnergyBag materials. Asked whether
Renewlogy’s plant was the one it examined, Sustainable Solutions
said it could not name the plant because of a non-disclosure
agreement with that facility.
    Reynolds and Dow had no comment about the study.
    Renewlogy said it supplied no data to Sustainable Solutions.
“Our numbers are vastly different from those used in the
report,” Renewlogy said in response to Reuters’ questions.
    
    CASHING IN ON TRASH
    Advanced recycling projects have mushroomed globally,
especially since 2018. That’s when China, once the top buyer of
the world’s used plastic, banned these imports because its
recyclers were overwhelmed. Other countries, too, are shutting
their doors to foreign waste, putting pressure on the developed
world to deal with its own garbage.
    The boom is also being fueled by investors looking for the
next hot green-tech industry.
    Most of the advanced recycling firms involved in the
projects reviewed by Reuters use a form of pyrolysis, the
process of breaking down matter using high temperatures in an
environment with little or no oxygen.
    Pyrolysis has been tried before on plastic. British oil
giant BP Plc  BP.L , German chemical maker BASF SE  BASFn.DE 
and U.S. oil company Texaco Inc - now owned by Chevron Corp
 CVX.N  - all separately dropped plans to scale up waste-to-fuel
pyrolysis technologies more than 20 years ago due to technical
and commercial problems.     
    BASF said it now believes such an endeavor is viable. It
said in October 2019 it invested 20 million euros in Quantafuel
 QFUEL-ME.OL , a Norway-based plastic-to-fuel company listed on
the Oslo Stock Exchange.
    Some scientists challenge the assertion that melting
unsorted plastic made from a variety of chemicals is good for
the environment.
    In addition to consuming large amounts of energy, “pyrolysis
can generate toxic waste, such as dioxins,” said Hideshige
Takada, a geochemist and professor at the Tokyo University of
Agriculture and Technology who has studied pollutants in waste
for decades.
    Nor has pyrolysis proven capable of transforming unsorted
garbage into high-quality fuel and clean plastic resin, says
Susannah Scott, a chemistry professor at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, who receives funding from the
plastics industry to perform recycling research.
    Plastics have long been stamped with the numbers 1 to 7
inside the familiar “chasing arrows” logo to help traditional
recyclers separate the waste before processing it.
    Scott said melting different numbered plastics together
through pyrolysis produces a complex blend of hydrocarbons that
must then be separated and purified for reuse. That process
requires a lot of energy, she said, and typically yields
products that don’t measure up to the quality of the original
material.
    With pyrolysis, “the value of what you’re making is so low,”
Scott said.
    Advanced recyclers say they’re overcoming these problems
with innovations in energy efficiency and purification.
    Of two-dozen companies whose projects were reviewed by
Reuters, three have gone public in the last year: PureCycle
Technologies Inc  PCT.O , Agilyx AS  AGLX-ME.OL  and Pryme B.V.
 PRYME-ME.OL . The market value of all has declined since their
debuts.
    One of the hardest hit has been PureCycle, a
Florida-headquartered advanced recycling startup that went
public this year through a special purchase acquisition company.
It ended its first day of trading on March 18 with shares up 13%
to $33, giving it a market capitalization of around $3.8
billion.
    But its shares tumbled 40% on May 6, the day short-seller
Hindenburg Research published a report calling the recycler’s
technology “unproven” and its financial projections
“ridiculous.” PureCycle shares have since regained some ground.
    PureCycle said the same day that Hindenburg’s report was
“designed to drive down the stock price in order to serve the
short seller's economic interests.” It declined further comment
about the report.
    Hindenburg declined to comment.
    According to its website, PureCycle uses a “ground-breaking”
recycling process developed by P&G, maker of Gillette razors and
Head & Shoulders shampoo, to turn a particular type of waste
plastic, polypropylene, back into resin. PureCycle is around two
years behind schedule on its first commercial plant, which its
CEO Mike Otworth told Reuters on March 6 was due to
slower-than-expected debt financing and the coronavirus
pandemic.
    P&G declined to comment.
    The ACC, the chemicals trade group, continues to promote the
potential of advanced recycling. Last year, it spent $14 million
lobbying members of Congress on various issues, the most the
organization has ever spent, according to OpenSecrets.org, a
non-profit initiative that tracks money in U.S. politics.
    Until her two-year term ended in December, Renewlogy’s
Bakaya was the chair of the ACC’s advanced recycling unit.
    
    ONE TO WATCH
    Bakaya grew up in Australia after her father emigrated there
from India, she told business podcast Upside in 2020. She
attended Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), graduating from the latter in 2011. She became
a prominent figure in advanced recycling, promoting her
technology on media forums such as National Geographic and the
BBC.
    Bakaya garnered a string of accolades, including making
Fortune’s “40 under 40: Ones to Watch” list in 2013.
    She declined to be interviewed for this story.
    Bakaya said in a TEDx talk in 2015 that she initially set up
a company called PK Clean to recover oil from “mixed, dirty
landfill-bound plastic.” PK Clean later changed its name to
Renewlogy, Bakaya said in an interview with MIT in 2017.
    Steve Case, co-founder and former chief executive of AOL
Inc, invested $100,000 in PK Clean in 2016, according to a blog
he authored on the website of his venture capital firm
Revolution. The governor’s office in Utah said it gave a total
of $200,000 in grants in 2016 and 2017, while Salt Lake City’s
Department of Economic Development provided $350,000 in loans in
2015 to PK Clean, according to Peter Makowski, acting director
of business development for the department.
    Revolution did not respond to requests for comment. The Utah
governor’s office said the program under which PK Clean received
the grants had ended and it was no longer funding the company.
Salt Lake City said its loans to PK Clean have been repaid.
    Boise first sent plastic waste to Renewlogy in June 2018,
followed by at least five more truckloads in the following
months, minutes of meetings of Boise’s Public Works Commission
show. In June 2019, Boise said in a statement it had temporarily
stopped sending its waste to Renewlogy while the Utah plant
upgraded its equipment. Hefty EnergyBag said Renewlogy left the
program for good in December 2020. Renewlogy did not respond to
questions about how much of Boise’s plastic waste it had
recycled.
    Reuters made an unannounced visit to Renewlogy’s Salt Lake
City operation in mid-May. On a Monday afternoon, there was
little visible activity outside the facility; the front parking
lot contained five passenger cars, two of which had flat tires.
The back lot contained dozens of bales of plastic waste dotted
with faded orange recycling bags stacked next to rusty oil drums
and a wheelbarrow full of glass jars containing a murky liquid.
    Renewlogy co-founder Benjamin Coates emerged from the
building to speak to a reporter. Asked about the status of the
company, Coates said opponents of chemical recycling were trying
to damage the industry by pushing “conspiracy theories” about
the technology. He directed further questions to Bakaya before
telling Reuters to leave the premises.
    Jeremiah Bates, owner of a tire shop next door to Renewlogy,
said the recycling plant didn’t appear to have been active for
at least six months and that he had complained to Coates and the
local fire marshal about the debris piling up out back.
    Renewlogy did not respond to questions about Bates’
assertions.
    An inspector from the Salt Lake City Fire Prevention Bureau,
Jose Vila Trejo, visited the recycling facility on Feb. 12,
according to his inspection report. Vila Trejo told Reuters that
his tour of the plant turned up no fire hazard because there
were no machines present that could generate heat, flames or
sparks.
    “They were basically shut down,” Vila Trejo said. “There was
no equipment in there.”
    Renewlogy confirmed to Reuters that Vila Trejo inspected the
building in February. It said the facility had not shut down and
that there was equipment at the site.
    Renewlogy said it shares the Salt Lake City premises with
other companies that work on pyrolysis of wood and other waste,
and that much of the junk Reuters saw on the back lot belonged
to other firms that it declined to name. Renewlogy added that it
continues to operate its plant as a testing facility to develop
new plastic recycling technologies.
    Reuters exclusively reported in January that an advanced
plastic recycling project in India, which was a collaboration
between Renewlogy and a charity funded by plastic makers,
collapsed last year.  urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL1N2JS06C
    Renewlogy later this year plans to launch another plastics
recycling facility, this one in Phoenix, Arizona, according to
its website. Joe Giudice, assistant public works director at the
City of Phoenix, confirmed the facility was due to start being
set up in August. More taxpayer money is due to flow to the
company.
    The Arizona Innovation Challenge, a state-funded program, in
2017 awarded Renewlogy a $250,000 grant, funds that will be
dispersed when Renewlogy sets up in Phoenix, the Arizona
Commerce Authority, which runs the program, told Reuters.
    Giudice said Phoenix would not be sending Renewlogy any film
plastics due to uncertainty over whether they could be easily
recycled.
    Renewlogy said it would be “starting very small” and would
be “validating each step before scaling up.”
    
    BOUND FOR THE DEVIL’S SLIDE
    Back in Boise, the Hefty EnergyBag program continues, but
Renewlogy is no longer involved. Waste in those orange Hefty
bags now helps fuel the Devil’s Slide, a cement plant in Morgan,
Utah, part of the U.S. unit of Holcim, a European multinational
firm. The company told Reuters it has been burning Boise’s
plastic since March 2020 as a replacement for coal.
    Hefty EnergyBag has forged similar arrangements with cement
makers in Nebraska and Georgia, according to the environmental
study of the program commissioned by Reynolds.
    Environmental groups tracking chemical pollutants say
incinerating plastic this way produces significant carbon
emissions and releases dioxins associated with the chemicals in
the plastic. This is in no way “recycling,” said Lee Bell,
advisor to the International Pollutants Elimination Network
(IPEN), a global network of public interest groups working to
eliminate toxic pollutants.
    Bandlow, the Dow spokesperson, said the Hefty EnergyBag
program was helping to “transform waste into valuable products.”
He declined to respond to questions about the environmental
impact of burning plastic in cement kilns.
    Jocelyn Gerst, a spokesperson for Holcim's U.S. operations,
said the emissions levels of the plastic waste it burns are “the
same or lower than traditional fuel,” and that it had a state
permit to incinerate plastic. The U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency said it does not have any data to show that “substitution
of plastic waste for coal makes a significant difference in air
emissions.”
    Back in Idaho, Anne Baxter Terribilini, a resident of
Meridian, a Boise suburb, said she initially was eager to
participate in the Hefty EnergyBag program, but was
disillusioned to learn that her plastic waste now ends up in a
cement kiln.
    “I hate to feel like we are being lulled into complacency,
believing that we are having a positive impact on the
environment, when really we aren't,” she said.
    Boise officials said they’ve been transparent with the
public about the handling of their plastic waste. Haley
Falconer, Boise’s sustainability officer, said the city has
learned from the setbacks. In hindsight, she said, it would have
been better to build a customized recycling program with a local
partner so that Boise could control where its waste was going.
    But the city has no place else to put its plastic garbage,
so it’s sticking with the Hefty EnergyBag program, Boise’s
McCullough said.

    <^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
INSIGHT-Big Oil’s flagship plastic waste project sinks on the
Ganges     urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL1N2JS06C
From Shell to Unilever, plastics polluters back recycling-tech
flops     urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL8N2P47CU
SPECIAL REPORT-Plastic pandemic: COVID-19 trashed the recycling
dream     urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL4N2GU05T
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^>
 (Reporting by Joe Brock in Singapore, Valerie Volcovici in
Boise and John Geddie in London; Additional reporting by
Federica Urso in Gdynia; Editing by Marla Dickerson and Katy
Daigle)
 ((Joe.Brock@thomsonreuters.com; +65 9835 5351;))