The American Chemistry Council's Chemical Recycling Alliance announced it has changed its name to the Advanced Recycling Alliance for Plastics (ARAP) to reflect its growing membership and variety of members’ advanced recycling technologies. ARAP also announced three new members: GreenMantra Technologies, Chevron Phillips Chemical and Ravago Recycling Group.
ARAP started 2020 with an advanced recycling workshop at February’s Plastics Recycling Conference in Nashville, Tenn. The workshop helped educate attendees about these technologies, addressed concerns and questions from the value chain, and offered attendees options for getting engaged with advanced recycling.
“ARAP and ACC’s Plastics Division members are working to help answer increasing calls for solutions that enable society to use and reuse our valuable plastic resources and to overcome growth barriers for these innovative technologies,” said Prapti Muhuri, ACC’s manager of recycling and recovery and staff lead for ARAP. “Advanced plastics recycling is one of the fastest-growing solutions to America’s plastic waste concerns, and will help the plastics industry realize its goal of recycling or recovering all plastic packaging by 2040.”
The conference workshop is a continuation of the work the ARAP and ACC's Plastics Division members accomplished in 2019. In addition to communicating the sustainability benefits and environmental potential of advanced recycling technologies, APRA members supported the advocacy for modernized requirements in Iowa, Tenn., Tex., Ill., and Ohio that recognize advanced recycling as manufacturing operations instead of disposal operations.
In previous years, similar legislation was passed in Fla., Ga., and Wis. Advanced plastics recycling and recovery technologies can create a wide range of products from post-use, recovered plastics, such as plastic and chemical feedstocks, transportation fuels, and crude oil.