Washington calls for US standard for mass balance in chemical recycling

Washington — A new federal government report is calling for national standards around a "mass balance" approach to measuring recycled content in plastics made from chemical recycling, saying it would help speed the development of markets and technology.

The February report from a panel at the National Institute of Standards and Technology lends some support to stronger mass balance rules, which are a key part of the American Chemistry Council's federal legislative agenda around plastic waste. ACC praised the report.

However, environmental and recycling groups say they are taking a nuanced approach to the NIST report. They see mass balance as a viable technical tool but say there are big, unanswered questions around how to regulate chemical recycling.

In a Feb. 15 statement, ACC supported NIST's recommendations and said mass balance could help meet the demand for food contact and pharmaceutical-grade recycled plastic. The group said it's important to have certifiable methods to account for recycled plastic.

"NIST's recent report highlights the need for a credible and transparent system to track recycled plastic used in new products and packaging produced by advanced recycling," said Joshua Baca, ACC's vice president of plastics. "America's plastic makers are supportive of these recommendations, which will help achieve a circular economy for plastics."

Baca said mass balance is "one of the most widely accepted certification systems used today" in other industries, including coffee making forestry, and agriculture.

Mass balance is an accounting tool that's been proposed for use in plastics recycling because polymers made from chemical recycling can be identical to those made with virgin resin, making it harder to track recycled content in products without better measurement tools.

Baca said the NIST report "pointed to the successful use of mass balance in other sectors and the opportunity to accelerate the advancement of chemical (advanced) recycling."

"A mass balance system would help meet demands for recycled plastic, especially for food- and pharma-contact packaging, and help meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's goal of a 50 percent recycling rate by 2030," Baca said.

The federal agency's report, called "An Assessment of Mass Balance Accounting Methods for Polymers Workshop Report," was the result of a three-day workshop NIST held in May.

The event was widely attended by plastics companies and associations as well as a few environmental NGOs and municipal recycling operations, according to a participant list in the report.

NIST made seven primary recommendations, including having the U.S. develop mass balance, or MB, standards, establish clear goals to move toward a circular economy for polymers, and expand both mechanical and chemically recycled polymers.

In particular, the agency called for the United States to "adopt a national strategy for the implementation of rigorous MB accounting methods for circular polymers to rapidly expand capacity and markets for recovered polymers, particularly in products which are difficult to reuse or recycle by other means."

As well, it said any standards should be transparent and data should be public.

"Otherwise, any approach is vulnerable to confusion and miscommunication across the supply chain in the best case, and claims/accusations of malfeasance or greenwashing in the worst case," NIST said.

It said mechanical and chemical recycling systems should not compete with each other for feedstocks, and it said any mass balance standard needs to address controversial topics like energy loss and fuels.

An environmental group and an organization of local recycling programs that both attended the NIST workshop in May said mass balance could be a tool to measure recycled content and help decarbonize the economy.

But the Ocean Conservancy and the Alliance of Mission-Based Recyclers also both said a lot of questions remain about how mass balance will be used in regulations and more broadly about chemical recycling technologies.

Anja Brandon, U.S. plastics policy analyst for OC, said transparent tracking mechanisms will be needed as manufacturers look to use a lot more recycled content.

"It's the only way we're going to make progress in terms of recycled content standards and really enforce those standards, which is critical to the end goal of those policies — decoupling plastics from virgin production [and] shifting away from extraction as we shift toward a circular economy," she said.

But Brandon also said mass balance standards would be "putting the cart in front of the horse" because of other questions around chemical recycling.

The Alliance of Mission-Based Recyclers, echoed that, saying that mass balance has value as a technical tool but the debate is in the early stages in the U.S.

"I think you saw that in the NIST report," said Kate Davenport, co-president of Eureka Recycling, which collects recyclables from 200,000 homes in Minnesota and operates a material recovery facility in Minneapolis.

AMBR, which includes Eureka and other nonprofit local recyclers, has concerns about chemical recycling being used to turn plastics into fuel because it does not do enough to decarbonize the industry, Davenport said.

Using mass balance standards to create supply chains that rely on waste plastics to make fuels — even if some of the waste plastics also goes into new plastics — creates economic incentives against decarbonization, she said.

Davenport said rather than relying on chemical recycling to manage difficult-to-recycle plastics, products that use them should be redesigned to use more ecologically friendly materials that are simpler to recycle.

As well, Brandon said Ocean Conservancy does not see chemical recycling "happening at scale right now."

"I wish there was a really quick fix to our recycling problems," she said. "Chemical recycling is just not there right now."

Prior to joining Ocean Conservancy in September, Brandon spent a year as a Congressional science fellow working for Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., one of the main sponsors of the Break Free from Plastics Pollution Act in Congress.

She said the report could be helpful to Congress in answering bigger questions around how to regulate chemical recycling.

She pointed to debates in state legislatures, including new legislation favored by the plastics industry, to change how chemical recycling facilities are potentially regulated.

Mass balance is already part of the political debate in other countries. The British Plastics Federation, for example, said it was "continuing to press government hard" to accept mass balance as part of implementing that country's new tax on plastics packaging.

NIST was directed to write the report by the Save Our Seas 2.0 law, which passed in December 2020.

Brandon also said mass balance standards could play in a role in how companies are allowed to market the use of recycled content, a topic the Federal Trade Commission may take up this year with the rewrite of its Green Guides for environmental marketing.

Davenport said groups like hers are concerned that some plastics industry groups are pushing chemical recycling "without looking at where we need to invest in mechanical recycling. There's a lot of hesitancy around it."