The world recycles just 14% of the plastic packaging it uses. Even worse: 8m tons of plastic, much of it packaging, ends up in the oceans each year, where sea life and birds die from eating it or getting entangled in it. Some of the plastics will also bind with industrial chemicals that have polluted oceans for decades, raising concerns that toxins can make their way into our food chain.
Recycling the remaining 86% of used plastics could create $80bn-$120bn in revenues, says a recent report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. But those revenues will never be fully achieved without designing new ways to breakdown and reuse 30% (by weight) of the plastic packaging that isn’t recycled because the material is contaminated or too small for easy collection, has very low economic value or contains multiple materials that cannot be easily separated. Think of candy wrappers, take-out containers, single-serving coffee capsules and foil-lined boxes for soup and soymilk.
Large companies have developed plant-based alternatives to conventional, petroleum-based plastic so that they can break down without contaminating the soil and water. The market opportunity has attracted small, young companies that focus on developing recycling technology to tackle that troublesome 30% of plastic packaging that is headed to landfills at best, and, at worst, to our rivers, lakes and oceans.
The target: Polystyrene. It’s commonly made into products such as styrofoam cups, packing peanuts and rigid red picnic cups.
Trouble spot: Used polystyrene foam packaging has long been condensed and “downcycled” into décors such as crown molding or picture frames. Fully recycling used polystyrene back into the same material could reduce demand for oil and cut greenhouse gases even more.
The fix: Founded in 2006, Agylix’s technology breaks the polymer down to molecules, which it sells in liquid form to refiners that will bind the molecules to form polystyrene, according to CEO Ross Patten. Agylix’s technology can go further and convert polystyrene back to crude oil. It did that until last year, when low oil prices made it unfeasible to continue.
The challenge: Agylix, based outside Portland, Oregon, may find itself with a decreasing feedstock. There are legislative and grassroots campaigns in the US aimed at eliminating polystyrene packaging. Not only is it prevalent in oceans, but some public health advocates say it could cause cancer. Maryland is considering a ban on polystyrene foam packaging, and shareholder groups are pressuring Walmart, Target and Amazon to stop using the material for shipping.
The target: Low-density polyethylene (LDPE). It’s everywhere: grocery bags, produce bags and Ziploc bags. It’s also not accepted in curbside recycling programs. Some grocery stores do collect and send it to companies that turn it into plastic lumber and other products.
Trouble spot: Consumers tend to put LDPE in their recycling bins anyway, even though recyclers don’t want it. The material has become the bane of many recycling facility managers because they have no market into which to sell it, and in turn have not instituted systems for sorting and collecting the film. As a result, it tends to gunk up sorting and conveyance machinery.
The fix: Jeanny Yao and Miranda Wang, the entrepreneurs behind a two-year-old San Jose, California startup called BioCellection, are using genetic engineering to create a process that turns LDPE into chemical compounds for use in a variety of ways, including emulsifiers or cleansers in cosmetics to textile manufacturing. Their process involves feeding the plastic to a machine roughly the size of a cargo container and using a chemical treatment to break down the LDPE into small carbon-based molecules into powder form.
The powder will go into a bioreactor with bacteria that have been genetically engineered to eat the powder and secrete a lipid that’s used as an emulsifier or cleanser. It can replace compounds that currently are made from petrochemicals or palm oil, which typically comes from farms that have caused large scale deforestation and habitat loss in Malaysia and Indonesia. That has prompted many manufacturers, including clothing company Patagonia, to look for new sources.
“We are aiming to make sustainable biological products using the most problematic, unrecyclable mixed plastic waste as the starting material,” says Wang.
The challenge: The startup’s biggest hurdle will be weeding out both unwanted chemical additives in the polymers as well as random substances from trash collection that become attached to LDPE, says Susan Selke, who directs Michigan State University’s School of Packaging. Yao says she’s mindful of the issue and is working on creating bacteria that can eat or tolerate the contaminants.
The target: Low-density polyethylene (LDPE).
Trouble spot: Color – the product information and logos printed on plastic packaging is what has prevented LDPE from being recycled back into film which can be used for the same applications.
The fix: Cadel Deinking, which spun out of Spain’s University of Alicante three years ago, has developed a process that removes the ink by soaking the plastic in a solvent-free chemical bath. Cadel has licensed the technology to a Brazilian packaging provider that can produce recycled packaging, a process that can be cheaper than using petrochemicals or palm oil to make the plastics, according to Adriana Pineda, Cadel’s business development manager. (The same process also works with other plastics.)
The challenge: While Cadel can remove ink printed onto plastic, it can’t remove pigments injected into it, such as a colored cap on a plastic bottle. As a result, the company can only take white or clear plastic bag or shrink wrap with printed logos.
Cadel also only buys used plastic from businesses and factories instead of homes, where the plastic is more likely to get mixed in with unwanted materials. But the company has improved its machines that separate the plastic from contaminants, so it will begin testing its technology on post-consumer waste this year.
The target: Mixed-material packaging.
Trouble spot: Mixed-material packaging is made up of tightly laminated layers of plastic, cardboard and aluminum foil. Think of Capri Sun drink pouches or cardboard boxes for soup in the grocery aisle. This composition of materials can help extend the shelf life of foods, sometimes without requiring refrigeration, and is lighter than other packaging options such as glass or metal. However, separating materials for recycling is difficult and expensive to do, and few recycling programs will accept mixed-material packaging.
The fix: Saperatec, a six-year-old German company, has developed a process to separate the adhesive bonds of materials by shredding and putting them through a chemical bath. The technology will then isolate and cull the materials – aluminum, LDPE and polyester for recycling. Currently, Saperatec does not recycle paper used in these mixed materials.
Saperatec has been operating a pilot plant since 2014 and aims to have its first large scale recycling center open in 2018, according to Stefan Pöschel, the company’s head of sales and business development. It plans to recycle 18,000 metric tons of material each year.
The challenge: Saperatec can’t sell to the food and drink industry because of health regulations that prohibit recycled materials for food-contact packaging. Its current plant in Germany only takes used packaging from businesses because trash from these sources aren’t usually mixed with many types of garbage. It’s working on a process that can separate unwanted trash so that it can take mixed packaging materials from city recycling facilities.
- This article was amended on 23 February 2017 to delete a reference to Coca-Cola’s plant-based plastic because it doesn’t biodegrade or decompose.
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