Still fifty years to commercially scale pyrolysis technologies, new paper finds
Amended on 27 November 2024
Brussels, 21 November 2024 – While the petrochemical industry touts chemical recycling* as a solution to the plastic waste crisis, insiders acknowledge the technology won’t be commercially viable for another fifty years, a new paper reveals.
This new industry landscape overview published by Zero Waste Europe, “Fifty years: chemical recycling’s fading promise”, calls for a reduction in virgin plastic production to prioritise upstream solutions to single-use plastic that, ultimately, reduce plastic consumption at large. These include waste prevention, reuse, and then recycling.
In the paper, contacted experts, including former Shell scientist Prof. Jean-Paul Lange, warn that pyrolysis relies on continued virgin plastic production. According to Lange, it will take fifty years to “successfully ramp up chemical recycling.”
Even if scaled up, pyrolysis can only process a fraction of the plastic waste produced, and cannot be considered fully circular. Some major petrochemical companies like Shell are quietly backing away from investments in chemical recycling technologies due to doubts about its economic viability.
Despite this, the EU and other governments are providing significant public funding for chemical recycling projects.
Lauriane Veillard, Chemical Recycling & Plastic-to-Fuels Policy Officer, states:
“This overview confirms what we’ve been saying all this time. Pyrolysis is decades away from being economically viable and further locks us into fossil dependency and rampant plastic pollution. Governments must face obvious greenwashing and dismiss flexible ‘mass balance’ allocation to support upstream solutions like waste prevention and reuse. The UN will negotiate a Global Plastics Treaty next week that, ideally, sets a plastic production cap needed to remain within planetary boundaries. Let’s not take a step back.”
The industry is lobbying for the adoption of fuel-use-exempt “mass balance” accounting, which would allow companies to claim products contain a certain percentage of recycled material, even if that percentage is not present in each individual product. There are concerns that mass balance accounting lacks transparency and could mislead consumers, leading to greenwashing.
ENDS
Notes to the editor
- *In this press release and accompanying industry landscape overview, and for easier understanding, ZWE uses the term “chemical recycling” as proposed by the chemical industry, i.e including technologies like pyrolysis and gasification. However, ZWE does not classify these technologies as “chemical recycling”, but as “chemical recovery”. See our previous position paper for further information.
- Read the full report, “Fifty years: chemical recycling’s fading promise”, here: zerowasteeurope.eu/library/fifty-years-chemical-recyclings-fading-promise
- Zero Waste Europe has many resources related to chemical recycling and recovery. Amongst them are the report, “Leaky loop ‘recycling’: A technical correction on the quality of pyrolysis oil made from plastic waste”, here: https://zerowasteeurope.eu/library/leaky-loop-recycling-a-technical-correction-on-the-quality-of-pyrolysis-oil-made-from-plastic-waste/
Press contacts
Sean Flynn, Media Outreach & Communications Officer at Zero Waste Europe: [email protected] / +32 471 96 55 93
About Zero Waste Europe
Zero Waste Europe (ZWE) is the European network of communities, local leaders, experts, and change agents working towards a better use of resources and the elimination of waste in our society. We advocate for sustainable systems; for the redesign of our relationship with resources; and for a global shift towards environmental justice, accelerating a just transition towards zero waste for the benefit of people and the planet. www.zerowasteeurope.eu
