Advanced versus mechanical recycling: complementary, not competing technologies

Mura Technology’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Dr Geoff Brighty, says that a key aspect of his job is to ‘foster trust’ in advanced recycling (also known as chemical recycling). Here, he talks about how to do that as an advanced recycling company and the need for a regulatory framework in which to embed these new technologies.

As the recently appointed Chief Sustainability Officer at Mura, can you talk a bit about what your responsibilities entail?
Geoff Brighty: Formally, I’ve been in this role since February 2023, but previously was the Non-Executive Director at ReNew ELP, the first commercial-scale technology site for Mura’s HydroPRS™ advanced recycling process, at the Wilton International site at Teesside in the North East of England. I have been involved in the project and the technology since 2019 leading on sustainability.
I have also worked on the NGO side, having served as Technical Director for Plastic Oceans – the first UK plastic pollution charity which started in 2009, now known as Ocean Generation. I have gained experience working in the public sector, at NGOs and am now on the commercial side - but Mura is an amazing ‘project’, and that’s what attracted me to the company.
Currently, my responsibilities consist of overseeing the sustainability strategy for Mura Technology and ensuring that we are operating with the best information, the best evidence around our process and within the best context. This involves primarily working with science partners so we get the best, independent information that stands up to scrutiny. What we have to make sure is that - and here’s my former NGO self speaking – we foster trust in the information we produce.   

How? And how do you get that information out to the public?
We submit our data and information to independent, peer-reviewed studies so that others are making those judgements based on the models or systems that they have built. These are high-level scientists, and we ensure our assessments are made public via highly-regarded academic journals. Sharing our data via academic journals and organisations like the JRC, ensures transparency and helps inform policymakers who make decisions on the regulatory approach. Driving this is front and centre to what I do.

Do you find it an advantage to have had NGO experience in dealing with policymakers, legislation and the rest?
Yes, I am always thinking about how we will be judged by stakeholders – particularly regulators – those who give us license to operate. As I mentioned, that has to be based on good evidence and trust; and we must build and maintain that trust over the long term.
One of the key policy influencers in this space, I would say, would be the WWF. They are taking quite a strong stance on plastic packaging and rightly so – no plastic should end up in nature – so they have set out 10 Principles for Credible and Effective Chemical Recycling[1]. That’s immensely helpful, because then we understand their concerns and how those concerns can be addressed. Mura has a sustainability strategy that aligns with these principles, we think they are entirely appropriate. We’d like to think that becomes the basis of policy making on a global basis.

Are you affected by the controversy around advanced recycling?
Firstly, let me say that I think the questions raised are reasonable – and I don’t think we, as a company, shy away from them. They are fair challenges and we find ourselves having to build understanding and educating our stakeholders on our technology, and that’s across the board. So, whether that’s in the policy making frame, whether it’s regulatory bodies – we have to build familiarity. This is the first plant that we’re building, so it’s entirely new to them; but the regulatory basis for what we do is pretty simple. What we’ve now got to try and ensure is that that weight of evidence we are building is moving the conversation forward; in other words, the overall benefit of implementing advanced recycling to sit alongside mechanical recycling is substantial and needs to be recognised. We can make these processes even more efficient as we progress. And, we need to move the compass point forward to get to scale in order to create impact.
We have an ambition to have one million annual tonnes of premium oil output either in operation or in development by 2025 - there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be possible. I think we need to get to scale quickly – addressing residual waste plastic has to start and we have to make that happen because we know that the current system is essentially broken.

To what extent can advanced recycling play a role?
The world is emitting too much CO2 and we see too much plastic going into the environment. There’s a real demand for recycled content to come back into products, from both the industry as well as retail demand, as consumers want to see more sustainable plastics in certain types of packaging. The only option from a recycled content point of view is to look to material from advanced recycling, at least when it comes to having polyethylene or polypropylene food packaging come back through the loop again. It’s not feasible for mechanical recycling to do that at the moment at scale.
But I think there’s a wider point, which is that after a material has been mechanically recycled into packaging several times, the quality falls and it starts to degrade. Advanced recycling can play a role in regenerating that hard-to-recycle packaging back into virgin-quality material.
A recent report from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre indicated that advanced recycling and mechanical recycling should be seen as complementary, rather than competing, technologies. Do you agree?
Yes, I'm happy with the recent work from the Joint Research Center that says that we can't really rank mechanical over advanced recycling or vice versa – the technologies are giving us similar benefits but addressing different problem plastics in the waste stream. The JRC have taken a much more pragmatic view, essentially by saying ‘let's make sure this technology sector is processing the most appropriate waste for that process’ - which demonstrates complementarity. I think that's a really positive step forward. What the JRC has said is to give the high-quality waste to the mechanical recyclers, give the residual plastic to the advanced recyclers and you've probably got the best of both worlds.
I think the mechanical recycling sector is doing a very important job, but I think it’s very important to acknowledge that mechanical recycling can’t solve the problem on its own.
CEFLEX (the collaborative initiative of a European consortium of companies representing the entire value chain of flexible packaging) has done valuable work, calculating the quantity of material that needs to come back via an advanced recycling route to meet the minimum percentage of 10% PCR content in contact sensitive packaging made from plastic materials other than PET required by 2030, as well as the other new regulations that are coming through. CEFLEX have said they believe about 50% of flexible packaging on the market today needs to be  recycled via advanced processes to generate packaging to meet that European target. I think that as an ecosystem we've got to understand what we want the recycling industry to do - if it is to generate sustainable packaging going forward then we have to allow some of that to go to advanced recycling. Let's operationalise the sector to make that happen so that the European targets are hit.

But we first need to regulate advanced recycling as a form of recycling, surely?
That would be helpful. But I think the realization is already there; that to meet the regulatory outcomes that are already in place, advanced recycling technologies are going to be needed across the board - I think it is almost a destination that is agreed.
The regulations underpinning the UK plastics packaging tax states that advanced recycling content would count in any assessment of packaging against the 30% target; however, the means of calculating has not yet been agreed, although the government has now decided to consult on allowing a mass balance approach.
There is therefore already legislation in place where advanced recycling is expressly mentioned as delivering recyclate back into the circular economy. We just need to see that operationalised by having a calculation that's agreed. The UK recently published a new waste hierarchy where advanced and mechanical recycling were both mentioned in the same breath - I think we've all agreed just to call it recycling.

In recent news, Mura announced the results of a peer-reviewed Life Cycle Assessment  published by Warwick Manufacturing Group at the University of Warwick showing that processing waste plastic via your HydroPRS™ technology yielded an 80% reduction in climate impacts compared to incineration. But how are LCAs conducted in the plastic sector?
I would start off by saying that reliable Life Cycle Assessments are a challenge; there are no guidelines for how an LCA should be conducted for a recycling operation, although there are wider ISO guidelines. Every company is going to do something different because they are approaching it in a certain way. Everyone's ecosystem is different. What we've tried to do is to define the boundary conditions that sit around our operation really clearly so everyone can see what's included and what's not included.
Life cycle assessments generate a range of environmental impact categories. The key one that everybody's interested in, particularly because of energy intensity, is global warming potential. What Mura has tried to do is look at global warming potential from two aspects. Firstly, what is it that we avoid in terms of CO2 emissions by diverting plastic away from Energy from Waste (incineration) into our process - so what's the credit in that, if you will; and then, how do the products we produce compare to their fossil equivalents? That's how we've conducted it.
There are other categories that are important as well, including such as resource efficiency – the conservation of resources – where we’d be looking at the best route to keep the most material in circulation. This category is important because it's helping to understand circularity.

The global warming potential of the process Mura deploys is much lower compared to pyrolysis. Is that because of the use of steam?
It's true to say that Mura’s process is giving us a set of advantages over other processes in the thermal technology space. Pyrolysis is the one that everybody talks about, but it's fundamentally different to ours as a process.
We have gained advantages, probably on three accounts. One is the use of the supercritical water - we're dissolving plastic into a high-temperature, high-pressure steam water environment, which provides a very even heat transfer to the polymers and thus, efficient conversion into premium-quality oils. In pyrolysis you're directly heating the plastic which leads to some char formation in the process, which is in effect a waste and a yield loss of the desired products. By using water, we don't create a waste char, and our overall yield of valuable products is over 90%, if you include our process gas, compared to a 50-70% for pyrolysis, due to the waste material it generates. Bearing in mind that the global warming potential and the life cycle assessment is expressed on a per tonne of output basis, if we're producing more using the same amount of energy, we are more efficient, and that’s been reflected in the recent JRC LCA report.
The second advantage is we're operating at lower temperatures than pyrolysis, and thirdly, whilst our preprocessing material preparation step removes contaminants like paper, cardboard, metal, stones, and grit that's comingled with plastic bales, we do not need to clean the plastic itself to eliminate food residues. This is because in a water-based process, the inorganic material partitions predominantly to the water, and organics likely to come off as CO2. This makes the level – and hence the cost - of preprocessing our waste plastic somewhat lower than would be necessary for pyrolysis which needs a characteristically cleaner plastic feedstock.

How important is that to customers?
It gives us a sustainability improvement which is something our customers appreciate.
Customers want circular products and they want the circular resin and circular feedstocks to go into their resin production, but they also want to lower their carbon footprint. This is really important to them and their customers, as their ESG accounting is demanding, for example, that they reduce the quantity of plastic they consume and reduce their carbon footprint. We are well placed to deliver to both of those outcomes. That's the sustainability advantage that processes like ours can deliver.

How is Mura dealing with ESG?
We are going through our own ESG journey and to be able to do an ESG assessment and report you need to have the right data on what the process does on your energy balance, and that's where we are now. We are still pre-operational, but we are expecting to be able to generate ESG reports in the near future as we move into our operational phase. It's something we want to be doing because it then helps our customers – and investors - understand all the benefits that we can bring. It's very much a live activity inside the business at the moment.