Senators wade into debate on chemical recycling of plastics

Washington — Senators jumped into the chemical recycling debate at a recent hearing in Washington, with Democrats wondering if the technology needed more legislative controls and Republicans saying they saw it as innovation that could help reduce plastics waste.

A key senator on environmental policy, Delaware Democrat Tom Carper, for example, questioned industry representatives at the Dec. 15 hearing about whether chemical recycling of plastics could hurt the economics of mechanical recycling, if they both start competing for the same feedstocks.

"I've heard concerns from the plastics recycling community that increasing the number of chemical recycling facilities in the U.S. could hurt the financial viability of mechanical recycling facilities," said Carper, chairs of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which held the hearing.

"Can you identify any backstops in place to make sure that as chemical recycling grows, it does not take feedstocks from the mechanical recycling facilities," Carper asked Eric Hartz, president of Nexus Circular LLC in Atlanta. "And do we need for the government to provide those backstops?"

Hartz, who was one of two industry speakers on the panel, told Carper that chemical recycling, which is sometimes called advanced recycling, doesn't compete for the same materials, and should not.

Mechanical recycling, the more traditional technology that largely cuts and grinds plastics, should have priority, he said.

"It's generally just cheaper to mechanically recycle," Hartz said. "You shouldn't be doing advanced recycling if you can mechanically recycle. And we actually support that. The backstop is going to be the marketplace that allows for that to happen."

He said Nexus is particularly interested in plastic films as feedstocks for its process, noting that those materials are challenging for mechanical recycling to handle. He said Nexus wants those types of hard-to-recycle materials.

"Mechanical recycling is actually less work, if you will. There's some heat, you cut plastics up and you reform them," he said. "There's a lot of plastics that can go there. Those are not the plastics we seek."

Similarly, the head of a plastics trade association said both mechanical and chemical recycling, which he referred to molecular recycling, will complement each other.

"Our belief is it should be an all-of-the-above approach," said Matt Seaholm, president of the Plastics Industry Association. "In order for us to get where we want to go is it should be mechanical recycling and molecular recycling as part of the solution.

"Molecular recycling is better for purity when it comes to food contact. It is actually presenting us with some fantastic options," Seaholm said. "Our belief is the demand is going to be there and we support both types."

The chair of the hearing, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., quizzed Hartz on the kinds of plastic waste that Nexus can recycle.

"I'm probably the only person up here [on the dais for senators] who's actually visited a chemical recycling site," Merkley said.

Managers at that plant told him that they focused on getting a particular stream of materials because they — and their customers — wanted to know the chemical makeup of the plastics they would be recycling, Merkley said.

So the senator, who noted problems recycling plastics that are contaminated with food waste, asked Hartz if Nexus could handle used plastic utensils, and suggested that he thought the plant would not be able to.

From his comments, Merkley seemed to be probing business models around chemical recycling and the range of materials they could handle.

Hartz said he did not know what volume of plastic utensils Nexus received but told the hearing that the company could process some materials from consumer sources.

"We do actually take consumer type material as well," Hartz said. "It's not a large part of our stream. We do take materials from grocery stores. We're part of the energy bag program, we handle it that way too."

Merkley, who is one of the lead sponsors of the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, said he would follow up with Hartz seeking written answers for the hearing record.

"I'm going to have some questions for you for the record," Merkley said. "One of the questions I will ask you is exactly how many pounds of forks and straws and plastic lids, because that model does not fit with what I witnessed when I visited a chemical recycling site."

The hearing represents a continuation of growing Congressional interest and questioning from Democrats around chemical recycling, while Republicans spoke in more supportive terms.

The hearing covered a much broader range of plastics environmental topics, but at various points senators probed the finer points of chemical recycling.

For example, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the top Republican on the EPW subcommittee, said the technology could be a step forward and he noted industry efforts to improve the environmental footprint of plastics.

Wicker called advanced recycling an innovation that "allows many previously unrecycled plastics to be processed" and Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst asked Hartz to talk about industry investments in the technology and respond to critics who question whether it will work.

"Advanced recycling technology can also extend the shelf life of the existing materials so that fewer virgin materials have to be used," Wicker said. "These advancements are important to keep in mind as we look to the future of plastics and continue to work to reduce plastics waste."

On the Democratic side, however, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said he thought chemical recycling would "be a very small piece of a much broader solution that we need. … It is not a panacea."

Merkley, as well, was one of 35 House and Senate Democrats who wrote the EPA in July expressing concern over chemical recycling as a plastic waste management tool and disappointment that the Environmental Protection Agency is including it in national recycling policy discussions.

The plastics industry sees the technology as key to increasing recycling rates because it can be used to break down plastics to their molecular forms and be rebuilt as new polymers. It's seen as a strategy to reuse hard-to-recycle plastics.

But one witness from an environmental organization told the hearing that chemical recycling is "more of a marketing strategy than an actual solution to the plastics problem" because right now, the eight operating facilities with the technology can only process a tiny fraction of plastic waste in the U.S.

"Currently only 0.26 percent of the plastic waste is handled by this technology," said Judith Enck, president of the group Beyond Plastics. "The plastics industry has suggested they want to have 150 plants in the U.S. That would only handle 5 percent."

But Hartz from Nexus said the chemical recycling industry is in its early stages and getting ready to scale up.

"Any innovation has to start somewhere," he said. "Low-flow toilets, when they started had to be produced at small volumes to get to larger ones, then you can prove scalability. That's the cusp we're on now."

He said Nexus is operating a commercial-scale plant in Georgia and sees increasing demand as consumer product companies make public commitments to increase the use of recycled plastic.

"The demand for Nexus Circular's output far outstrips supply because plastics producers have set ambitious recycled-content goals to meet the demand of their own customers who, ultimately down the line, make end products for consumers," he said.

Industry groups also used the hearing to argue that chemical recycling is different than incineration, while Enck and other environmental groups argue it's equivalent to burning plastic.

Hartz said the Nexus process heats plastics to between 580° and 750° F, without oxygen, while incineration would burn plastic, with oxygen, at temperatures of 1,800° F to 2,700° F.

"We convert these plastics in one single heating and cooling cycle to produce products that our partners can convert into equivalent plastics using the same equipment they use to produce plastics today," he said.

But Enck, who was a regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration, told the hearing that chemical recycling has other uses, like turning plastics back into oils to create fuels, that are not climate friendly.

"When the plastics industry says they can use chemical recycling and create new plastics, that's not true," she said. "What they're mostly producing is fossil fuel. … The last thing we need is more climate warming fossil fuels."

Carper, who is also co-chair of the Senate Recycling Caucus as well as the top Democrat on the EPW panel, noted at the end of his allotted question period that he wanted Enck to respond in writing for the hearing record on whether using waste plastics to make fuel should be considered recycling. Enck said it should not be.