For decades, oil and gas companies have known that the majority of plastics — made from fossil fuel-derived chemicals — could not be recycled using traditional methods. But even as the industry faces state and class action lawsuits alleging deception, it’s now doubling down on a campaign to persuade lawmakers and regulators to embrace “advanced recycling,” or chemical recycling.
The term is a catch-all for various chemical processes that convert plastic waste into chemicals and fuels, which could then theoretically be used to make new plastic and reduce reliance on virgin fossil fuels. The problem? There’s scant evidence that the method actually works — but there is evidence that it generates hazardous waste andtoxic emissions, harming human health and the environment.
Fossil fuel companies are working hard to ensure that chemical recycling wins over the American public because plastic is one of Big Oil’s last lifelines. As the world’s demand for oil and gas decreases, major corporations are rushing to shift their investments to petrochemicals and peddle plastics to consumers. Meanwhile, millions of tons of plastic enter the ocean each year, and microplastics have been found virtually everywhere on earth, including inside the human brain.
The plastic industry’s largest lobbying group has set an ambitious goal of ensuring that 100 percent of plastic packaging in the United States is reused, recycled, or recovered by 2040. The current domestic plastic recycling rate sits at a measly 5 percent.
For decades, oil and gas companies have known that the majority of plastics — made from fossil fuel-derived chemicals — could not be recycled using traditional methods.
And yet, I have in front of me bottled spring water wherein the bottle reads “100% recycled plastic (excludes cap and label)”. How effectively plastic is recycled varies by region and by type of plastic; polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used for water and some liquor bottles and many other containers is the easiest to recycle, and is processed into pellets call rPET that are used for many purposes including new bottles. The CBC says that in Canada in 2015 there was a 79% recovery rate for PET containers. Admittedly, the situation is a lot more bleak elsewhere and for other types of plastics.
As discussed above, claim of “100% recycled” does not just mean post-consumer plastic, e.g. recovered from discard plastic bottles. Much of what is “recycled” is actually manufacturing scrap and sprue, and in fact has to be because the quality of recovered polymers from post-consumer products and packaging is not adequate for reuse by itself. This is notwithstanding the leaching of soluble compounds from container plastic and labeling into the environment as well as microplastic residues that are consumed by aquatic animals and marine fowl.
These guys claim that post-consumer PET is used for many water bottles:
Are bottled water companies using rPET?
Yes. For years, bottled water companies have been voluntarily including rPET in their containers. Many bottled water companies have embraced using rPET packaging, offering their product in containers that are made of 50, 75, or even 100 percent rPET. Recycled RPET FACTS - Bottled Water | IBWA | Bottled Water
This Ontario bottled water company actually runs their own recycling facility, turning post-consumer PET from Ontario’s blue bin recycling program into water bottles and saying it’s a closed loop that essentially can keep recycling the same plastic indefinitely.
Our water is generally fine so far as pollutants go, and tastes all right. Mot of the time, though, we use a Berkey gravity filter. Few of its parts are plastic.
Berkey Water Filters can remove
Lead - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Arsenic - Removed to greater than 99.9%
Iron - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Mercury - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Chlorine - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Bisphenol-A - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Chloramines - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Pharmaceuticals - Removed to greater than 99.5%.
Petroleum Contaminants - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Methylcyclohexane-methane - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Pesticides - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Heavy Metals - Removed to greater than 99.1%.
Atrazine - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Fluoride - Removed to greater than 99.9%.
Q: Does the Berkey water filter take out plastic from the water?
A: Plastic materials can be leached into the water, and the most common are BPA ( Bisphenol A) and 1,1-Dichloroethane (11-DCA). The Black Berkey elements have been tested to remove both plastic materials.
You conveniently cherry picked one line out of that paragraph. Let’s put it in context:
Are bottled water companies using rPET?
Yes. For years, bottled water companies have been voluntarily including rPET in their containers. Many bottled water companies have embraced using rPET packaging, offering their product in containers that are made of 50, 75, or even 100 percent rPET. Beverage Marketing Corporation reports that, for those bottled water companies that use rPET, the average amount of rPET per container went from 3.3 to 18.2 percent between 2008 and 2017–a 452 percent increase.
It’s pretty difficult to take seriously the claim of “containers that are made of 50, 75, or even 100 percent rPET” as representative of typical recycling when the reported average is less than 20 percent.
From your same link:
Can a PET/rPET bottle be recycled over and over or does it degrade over time?
A PET bottle can be recycled over and over again. While it’s true that a breakdown of the polymer chains occurs when the resin goes through multiple heat cycles during the recycling process, which degrades the PET’s intrinsic viscosity (IV) (i.e., a measure of the molecular weight of the polymer that reflects the melting point, crystallinity, and tensile strength of the material), recyclers can use additives to raise PET’s IV.
To meet growing demand from beverage makers for significant amounts of recycled content in their bottles, recyclers use chain extenders to raise PET’s IV. These additives are molecules that attach to the ends of broken polymer chains, reconnect them, and produce the longer chains needed for production of PET bottles.
It is somewhat disingenuous to purport that these materials are “100% reusable” when they actually requires additives to make it usable, but more concerning is that a common extender, pyromellitic dianhydride (PMDA) may cause occupational asthma
Why is this difficult when the bottle I’m holding in my hand says “100% recycled plastic”?
You appear to have forgotten your original claim that very little post-consumer rPET is used in making plastic bottles, whereas in fact many companies – the Ontario company I cited being just one example – appear to claim that their bottles are made entirely from post-consumer rPET in a potentially indefinite closed loop.
The recycling argument is hardly “disingenuous” just because additives may be required. The amount of PMDA necessary for restoring polymer chains when blow-molding plastic bottles is typically between 0.5% and 0.75% of the rPET by weight, which hardly amounts to even a trace. And I don’t think the “specific inhalation challenge (SIC)” related to airborne particulates in a manufacturing environment has any relevance whatsoever to the presence of trace amounts of PMDA during the PET recycling process. In any case, I’m a big consumer of bottled spring water and it hasn’t given me asthma yet, but I don’t grind up and inhale the plastic bottle.
FWIW, I have no dog in this fight and for all I know companies like Ice River Sustainable Solutions (my second link, which I don’t believe you actually looked at) and industry associations like IBWA may be peddling a certain amount of hype. But I’m reasonably satisfied with the general veracity of what they say, and that the large volume of PET I routinely recycle (most of it from bottled spring water) is indeed being responsibly recycled into new bottles and other consumer products. I’m less confident about other types of plastic and other materials, but all I can do is follow the recycling guidelines and trust that the processors are more or less behaving ethically most of the time.