Grapevine, Texas. — The Association of Plastic Recyclers has a new report pointing to the potential of combining traditional mechanical recycling programs with pyrolysis technologies.
"APR is supportive of chemical recycling technologies that complement mechanical by converting post-consumer plastics back into recycled products suitable for manufacturing new plastic products," said Kate Eagles, program director for APR.
Since 2021, APR recognized the chemical recycling debate and previously said it supports responsible use of chemical recycling.
But the organization decided to take a deeper dive and focus specifically on pyrolysis due to the amount of capacity available. APR focused on the challenges on the residential side of the material and how collection would work. APR is specifically looking at post-consumer materials from households and not a heavy focus on post-industrial materials.
APR notes flexible film packaging is a challenge to collect, sort and recycle due to material weight, multimaterial use, varying sizes and formats. The report notes pyrolysis could capture 30 percent of the materials collected from households via curbside collection.
"Household film and flexible plastics are a little more challenging to collect and recycle because they don't typically go through an MRF [materials recovery facility]," Eagles said in an interview with Plastics News. "Their [film] feedstock has a lot of overlap. It was something our members were not looking at that closely."
APR said 125,000 tons of polyethylene film is recycled, which would support the feedstock for chemical recycling. Over half of the total flexible film packing stream uses PE. The research group focused on a 2030 forecast for the material.
"We looked at pretty optimistic scenarios where 50 percent of flexible packaging that is not [currently] designed for recovery ... would be changed to be able to be recovered and be part of that stream," Eagles said. "And we looked at scenarios with more EPR [extended producer responsibility] legislation to help support and fund a system."
APR said the process to collect and convert film will be complex and expensive and will require system changes to scale correctly.
APR estimates 1.2 million tons of flexible film packaging could be collected with 930,000 million tons available for chemical recycling after sorting. The total cost estimates are $827 million, with a breakdown of $689 cost per collection and $889 cost per ton sorted.