Opinion: Why innovation in chemical recycling matters more than ever
Iranpolymer/Baspar After decades of incremental progress, the plastics industry finds itself at a turning point. For years, society has dealt with end-of-life plastic by simply landfilling or incinerating it, if not simply letting it fly in the wind or float on the water. But the damage caused by fossil carbon dioxide emissions, microplastics, and loose plastic fragments is growing, and better solutions are needed.
Until now, the industry leaned heavily on mechanical recycling and to be fair, it’s done a decent job with some materials, particularly clean, single-type plastics like PET in bottles. It is, however, limited: it does not work well on plastic mixtures (like the dozens of variants of polyethylene), on multi-material systems (like films that can be made up of as many as 11 layers), on plastics with a lot of fillers and pigments, and on plastics contaminated by things like food residues.
That is where chemical recycling comes in—or at least, where it should come in. Touted as the future of plastic waste recovery, chemical recycling promises to reach the kinds of materials mechanical systems cannot address. But the methods most widely used today still fall far short of what is needed. If we want to build a truly circular economy—one that is economically and environmentally viable—we need to rethink the entire play book.
Why the status quo is not enough
As mentioned, most chemical recycling relies on heat—think temperatures of 450 C or greater for pyrolysis—which makes them energy-intensive and less environmentally friendly than they could be. Also, the product from pyrolysis is not what the chemical industry likes: it needs additional, expensive upgrading to get to the right chemical composition. And while the process works with clean, sorted waste, that does not reflect what recycling facilities handle every day. Additional treatment is needed to remove contaminants like chlorine and oxygen compounds.
The result? Pyrolysis only marginally expands the range of plastics we can recycle. And we end up with an expensive, energy-hungry system where techniques overlap in terms of feedstock, while leaving the lion’s share of the plastic waste untreated.
Add to that an abundance of low-cost virgin materials and growing regulatory pressure (like Extended Producer Responsibility and the European Plastic Packaging Waster Regulation), and it should be obvious that the polyolefins industry has work to do to get to much higher recycling rates in a financially viable way.
Taking a new approach
For recycled plastic to truly compete with traditional fossil-based alternatives, the costs associated with collecting, sorting, and processing must be kept in check. However, achieving efficiency in recycling isn’t an overnight process—it takes time, much like the chemical industry, which required decades to refine its methods. At its core, the challenges in plastic recycling go beyond economics. The industry grapples with scarcity of high-quality feedstock, the inefficiencies of sorting and material loss, complex purification processes, high energy consumption, and emissions—all of which raise deeper concerns about sustainability. To make recycled plastics viable long-term, these fundamental hurdles must be addressed with smarter technology, streamlined logistics, and policies that support innovation.
In other words: recycling systems must be able to handle most waste and do so affordably. If they only tackle part of the waste, require costly post-treatment, and lose too much carbon and energy in the process, they are just less sustainable and will lose out.
Therefore, industry must innovate beyond existing methods to meet both economic and sustainability goals.
Why this matters now
If we want chemical recycling to live up to its promise, we need to stop thinking in terms of small improvements. What is needed is a step-change: a process can accept most of the waste that is left after mechanical recycling and that converts that affordably. Specifically, the process should:
• Handle all polymers in the mix (after taking out the easy bits like PET bottles), such as polyamides and PET used in multilayer films.
• Tolerate typical amounts of water, paper, aluminium, inks and adhesives.
• Use less energy and generate less waste (like char and light gas).
• Minimise posttreatment.
At Aduro Clean Technologies, we discovered a chemical pathway that addresses these challenges.
The Hydrochemolytic Technology (HCT) is a fundamentally different way of breaking down plastics: it can deal with the various contaminants, requires less energy (around 400 C), loses less valuable carbon to char and gas, and generates a product that requires little or no after treatment. Because of this it will work with the messy, imperfect streams that mechanical recyclers typically discard, including multilayer packaging and plastics with additives. That opens the door to recovering more material—and doing so in a way that is more efficient and cost-effective.
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