I have always been a pragmatist at heart. When my kids were young, I eschewed sleek cars to buy a series of minivans. Surely, I could squeeze car seats in the back seat of my Acura, but the minivan was just more practical. When skinny jeans were popular, I did look good in them, when I could get them on, but cargo pants had more pockets. You get the point.
I started my plastics recycling/sustainability journey in 1982 and then started a consulting and management company called A Greener Solution in 2006. Sustainability was defined then as "landfill avoidance" through beneficial reuse and increased recycling. Our clients were attracted to our practical methods of diverting byproducts to recycling and repurposing and documenting the savings.
The process always began with a baseline byproducts assessment and ended in a road map and a detailed implementation plan. Along the path, we were influencing change in the corporate culture to prioritize recovery of the value of the materials they used to make their products and build the infrastructure to sustain progress and continuously improve recovery. Our programs were extremely successful, and while the goal was 100 percent zero waste to landfill, we often fell short of this goal, winding up at 90 percent diversion. Should we have dropped the programs or not implemented them because we could not reach 100 percent from the very start?
Today, sustainability is defined as circularity, the ability to make a product and, at the end of its life, convert the material elements into the same product. Closing the loop lessens the need for more virgin materials, reduces emissions and instills the value of resource recovery. In plastics, we have seen the development of post-consumer mechanically recycled materials at quality levels that are improving every day and in food-contact applications. PET bottle-to-bottle recycling programs, for example, will continue to grow with increased collection and some help from a consistent regulatory environment that mandates minimum recycled content. We could have only seen this development due to the enormous investment in collection and recycling infrastructure.
Mechanical recycling has its limits despite the advances in quality and scale. Advanced molecular recycling is an emerging option to recover the value of hard-to-recycle materials, improve recycling rates and strive toward full circularity. But critics have assailed advanced molecular recycling in its many iterations, because 100 percent of the offtake applications are not circular or because the yield of the process is "too low" or "only suitable for fuels. Purists maintain that EPR schemes direct funds to solely to 100 percent circular systems and regulators fall for NGOs' classification of advanced recycling as "incineration" and to be shunned. Should we then toss technologies aside that recover the value of materials at the end of life that are not circular yet? Should we, for example, not build plants to convert waste plastics and tires to hydrogen for conversion to fuel cells or electricity, or aviation and marine bunker fuel because they are not 100 percent circular even though the transition to more sustainable methods to power transportation could be decades away from wholesale adoption?
Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $182 million loan to IRG, a Pennsylvania-based company that proposes to sort mixed plastic waste, extracting the PET, high density polyethylene and other materials suitable for mechanical recycling and through their technology, convert the remaining waste into a replacement for coal-based coke in steel making. A Chicago Tribune article summarizes the health effects of steel making and particular coke, which they describe as "very dirty fossil fuel." Critics have railed against the project, ignoring the benefits of sorting materials for mechanical recycling and replacing coke with plastic waste, which presents lower emissions. I believe we will be using steel for the foreseeable future, and we should be looking at every angle to reduce environmental effects. Should we abandon this project because a percentage of plastic waste is converted to coke?
When we look back through history, there are many examples of transformational change where the transition took decades. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the predominant mode of intraurban transportation was tied to horses. The automobile could not be widely adopted until the infrastructure of roads, service stations, traffic management systems and driver education were solidly in place. With the basic infrastructure, innovation and investment followed, creating motels, restaurants and economic development along roads and highways.
I understand the arguments against projects where today only a fraction of the output can be used to create new plastics and support common sense reuse schemes and plastic reduction through lightweighting and downgauging. But as we look toward the future, we need a unified vision that allows for the recovery of materials at the end of life in a variety of applications — some circular and some not — as we build the collection and processing infrastructure and innovate as we transition towards a truly circular world. Let's be pragmatic.
Robert Render is the president and CEO of Lakeside 360 Partners, a Skokie, Ill.-based consulting firm specializing in sustainable product development, recycling and the circular economy.