Fossil fuel industry keys in on unproven recycling methods to prop up plastics

For decades, the fossil fuel industry has urged recycling as an alternative to bans or cuts in the single-use plastic filling world landfills and oceans.

Now, with the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP28) just around the corner, the industry is making that pitch on a global scale — and using it to water down efforts to cut the use of fossil fuels.

That strategy was evident last week at the third Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting (INC-3) in Nairobi, Kenya — part of a process legally bound to secure an international agreement on plastics by 2024.

It began with high hopes and soaring rhetoric, with President William Ruto of Kenya — a country that has banned a wide array of single-use plastics — calling on negotiators to be “the first domino” in the “inevitable” change toward a world of greatly reduced plastic use.

Instead, negotiations ended in deadlock and confusion, as countries including Saudi Arabia and China joined trade groups such as the American Chemistry Council to fight the idea of in any way limiting the production of plastics. 

More than 140 registered fossil fuel and plastics lobbyists attended, many attached to six national delegations — making them by far the largest bloc at the conference. 

The army of fossil fuel and petrochemical representatives also outnumbered independent scientists 4 to 1 and outnumbered the collective delegations of the 70 smallest countries put together.

They entered a conference that had on its agenda the possible “phaseout” of particularly damaging and replaceable plastics — and proceeded to argue that no such thing was necessary. Instead, the petrochemical groups are holding out the hope of a “circular economy” in which waste plastic is indefinitely reused to form new plastic products.

Their weapons in this campaign: innocuous-sounding phrases like “national priorities,” “national circumstances,” the push for “a bottom-up approach” and a plea for “technological innovation.”

All of this, anti-plastics campaigners argued, sought to water down the original goal of the treaty, which was a binding and solid agreement that would meaningfully reduce the amount of plastics entering the environment.

That number is staggering: the equivalent of 2,000 dump trucks per day poured into the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans. One landmark 2017 study in Science found that 8.3 million tons of plastics had been produced to date, virtually all of which was still in landfills or the environment — and which was still dwarfed by the 12 million tons of plastic that study authors said would be in landfills or the environment by 2050 if nothing changed.

That profusion of plastic is an issue “of deep concern,” wrote a confederation of 60 U.N. member states calling itself the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution.

The alliance of countries, led by Norway and Rwanda, favored expanded recycling and new-model plastics that were easier to break down and remake into other products. But this took a distant back seat to their call for binding measures for countries to produce less plastic.

In particular, they pushed the chair to “eliminate and restrict unnecessary, avoidable, or problematic plastics,” starting with those most damaging to human health and the environment.

In addition to waste management — which one activist compared to mopping the floor from an overflowing bathtub — “we must also turn off the tap,” a representative from the coalition of small Pacific nations wrote.

For this group, “there is no difference between plastic and plastic pollution — plastic is pollution,” as Rafael Eudes of Brazil’s Aliança Residuo Cero, or Zero Waste Alliance, said in a statement.

This coalition urged the INC-3 chair to take decisive action to turn the hodgepodge of mutually contradictory suggestions that made up the prior session’s “Zero Draft” into a streamlined and condensed First Draft that would be ready for the next session.

But none of that is what happened. Negotiations ended with a Zero Draft that had massively expanded with both pro- and anti-plastics proposals — a draft that members, in another blow to momentum, were forbidden to work on before they meet again in April in Ottawa, Canada.

With only two meetings remaining before time runs out on the treaty process, that raises the real prospect of failure — a possibility that the plastic-reduction hawks argued was the aim of the far-smaller coalition of attending states and lobbyists that depend heavily on the profits from fossil fuels.

This coalition of about a half-dozen countries — including China, Russia and Iran — sought to convince members that production caps were unnecessary even for the most damaging and dangerous plastics — and that the solution was better “waste management” of the floods of plastic it still plans to produce.

“Primary plastics have become a cornerstone of modern society,” the Saudi delegation wrote before the meeting, referring to new “virgin” plastics pulled directly from fossil fuels. 

“Phasing out their supply and demand would not only stifle technological innovations but also risk economic growth and stability,” the Saudi team wrote.

They were joined in this push by China, a major plastics producer whose negotiators wrote before the conference that “limiting the production of plastic polymers is not a straight solution to plastic pollution” and called to cut any such bans from the ultimate treaty.

While the U.S. didn’t formally join this bloc, its negotiators in Nairobi sought “to replace concrete global commitments with catchy buzzwords and unenforceable promises,” according to a summary from the Center for International Environmental Law.

The Biden administration’s own proposed plan for plastic waste also makes no mention of binding measures to cut plastic production. Instead, the administration is relying on an embrace of “voluntary” measures to reduce single-use plastic, new purchasing guidelines that steer government agencies away from single-use products and expanded recycling — measures roughly in line with those urged by the petrochemical industry. 

This pro-plastic coalition’s principal talking point was summarized by Matthew Kastner of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a leading petrochemical lobby group that counts fossil fuel giants Exxon and plastics manufacturers Dow and DuPont among its members.  

Kastner told Reuters last week that “the plastics agreement should be focused on ending plastic pollution, not plastic production.”

That depends on the idea that the plastic waste stream — more than 80 percent of which goes into landfills and the environment, and of which half of the remainder is simply burned — can be reconfigured into a closed “circular” loop.

As a groundbreaking 2020 report by NPR and Frontline found, that is a pitch that the industry has been making for decades — while knowing it was not able to deliver on it. 

“There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,” one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech, NPR and Frontline found.

But recycling, a plastic trade group leader told them, did have one major attribute: It extended the public acceptance of plastics, or what is now called their “social license.”

“If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, former president of what is now the Plastics Industry Association, told NPR.

The keystone of the modern version of this pitch is “chemical recycling,” which seeks to replace the grueling sorting-by-hand of soggy and smelly plastic waste into distinct recycling streams with a streamlined, automated process.

According to the industry pitch, this could allow for the creation of new plastics from the building blocks of the old. Kastner of ACC pointed The Hill to a list of 79 chemical recycling facilities globally that are “planned, operational or under construction.”

“Chemical recycling is a proven technology happening at commercial scale across the globe,” Kastner told The Hill. 

He pointed to the “many products on the global marketplace using plastics remade from chemical recycling,” including a Dow initiative to use ground-up plastic to replace some of the asphalt in road tar and an ExxonMobil project to turn discarded fishing lines into shipping crates.

But these projects are tiny compared with the plastic waste stream: Against the 22 million tons of plastic that enters the environment annually, the Dow and Exxon projects have reused around 1,000 tons each — about one part in 22,000.

The amount the industry invests in advanced recycling — $8.7 billion according to the ACC — is also dwarfed by the $164 billion it put into the pipeline for new factories to produce virgin plastics in the U.S. alone.

In other words, the petrochemical industry has spent nearly 20 times as much on new plastics as on advanced recycling, which it says is key to the industry — and which it says is the reason that such new production need not be limited.

A report by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) found that of the 37 “chemical recycling” facilities proposed since 2000, only three were still functioning as of 2020. The remaining three facilities were “plastics to fuel,” in which a mixed stream of plastics is broken down under heat provided by fossil fuels into a chemical slurry that can be added to fuels or burned for energy. 

As reporting from ProPublica has found, this can be massively carcinogenic: One Chevron boat fuel additive derived from melted-down plastics was a million times more toxic than most new chemicals approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

EPA scientists found that anyone exposed to the fuel over a lifetime would get cancer — six times worse odds than the lung cancer risk of lifetime smokers. The agency ultimately decided to permit the fuel anyway.

And then there is the climate cost. The energy needed to create a kilogram of recycled polyethylene plastic from reused materials takes seven times as much energy as required to make a kilogram of similar plastics from fresh fossil fuels, Taylor Uekert, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told The Guardian.

Uekert and other researchers at the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado found that the principal technologies that make most plastics-to-fuels — pyrolysis and gasification — were so environmentally damaging and energy-intensive that they could not reasonably be considered circular. The EPA no longer considers this to be recycling, according to the National Recycling Plan.

“You’re extracting fossil fuels that take a brief vacation as a piece of plastic — before they’re turned back into a fossil fuel and burned, using fossil fuels to power the process,” Claire Arkin of GAIA told The Hill. 

Arkin described the push for chemical recycling and “circularity” as a reason to avoid production caps as akin to “a Pied Piper situation” and part of the same 50-year-long trajectory that “has put us in the dire situation that necessitated a plastics treaty in the first place.”

She added that “any time and money put into waste management one might as well throw down the drain if it’s not paired with reduction measures. Otherwise, we’ll be cleaning up forever as the world drowns in plastic.”

At the Nairobi conference, plastics spokespeople argued that plastics — which are still almost entirely produced from chemicals and energy derived from fossil fuels — were, in fact, a climate solution. 

“Plastic products have tremendous value and benefits — they’re more affordable and versatile than alternatives, have lower [greenhouse gas] emissions profiles, and require less water and raw materials to make,” wrote the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) in a release aimed at Nairobi.

The AFPM added that American corporations were pushing for more recycling and the opportunity to use more recycled materials — but said that bans or caps on plastics production would scare them off.