Even with a road map for zero carbon goal, task is ‘quite mind-blowing'

The European plastics industry has an ambitious plan to be more circular and reach net zero carbon emissions, but as a panel discussion at K 2022 showed, getting there will be a challenge.

The plan, contained in the April report "Reshaping Plastics" by the trade group Plastics Europe, said the industry would need to step up dramatically to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050 and boost the recycling rate above its current 14 percent in the nearer term.

On the panel, held Oct. 19 at the Plastics Europe booth (Hall 6, Booth C40), there was some skepticism about getting there.

"Yes, there's a road map, there's a pathway, but honestly, the scale of innovation that is needed to achieve this net zero, I find it still quite mind-blowing," said Joan Marc Simon, executive director of Zero Waste Europe. "It's going to be very, very difficult."

Simon sat on the steering committee for the report, which was commissioned by the trade group but written independently by consulting firm Systemiq, the groups said.

On the panel, representatives from industry, environmental groups, academics and a staffer from the European Commission's environment directorate hashed out the report and its conclusions around single-use plastics, the need for renewable energy and the best uses of mechanical and chemical recycling.

"I think we have seen a huge, huge acceleration in this field in the last two to three years," said Martin Yung, president of performance materials at BASF and a Plastics Europe board member. "I think everybody in the chemical industry as well as the plastics industry understands the necessity, the climate challenge, that we face.

"The most surprising and at the same time the most encouraging message of the entire study was that net zero is actually possible for plastics," Yung said. "It is the first study really showing a path towards it, the elements to it, the cost and everything."

The report, which was endorsed by Plastics Europe, said pointedly that the continent's plastics sector will need to make much faster change in the next five years to lay the groundwork to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and meet targets of global climate agreements.

The report noted that while the net zero carbon goal is three decades away, decisions in the next three to five years will be critical.

"Long technology maturity cycles and capex lock-in for large infrastructure investments mean that the decisions taken in the early 2020s will determine whether or not the European plastics system will achieve a circular economy and net zero GHG emissions by 2050," it said.

BASF's Yung said the report also showed that a very important factor in decarbonizing the European plastics industry will be to speed up the continent's development of renewable energy.

Yung, who also was on the report's steering committee, said it supported accelerating chemical recycling technologies to complement traditional mechanical recycling.

"I think the study shows that chemical recycling, in addition to mechanical recycling, has a place and has to be accelerated," Yung said. "There are a couple of framework questions to be solved, clearly."

He said mass balance standards need to be developed to further chemical recycling.

The report said Europe should double mechanical recycling volumes to 6 million metric tons by 2030 and boost chemical recycling to 3 million tonnes, with the latter being particularly helpful to recycle more food packaging.

But Kim Ragaert, a professor and deputy chair of the report's steering committee, cautioned the K 2022 audience that some chemical recycling technologies like pyrolysis should not be oversold as a solution to hard-to-recycle mixed waste plastic.

"I always go on about the fact that pyrolysis is not a silver bullet," said Ragaert, who is a professor and chair of circular plastics at the University of Maastricht. "Everybody claims that you can put anything contaminated, complicated in there. Sure, you can put it in, but your yields are going to be horrible."

She argued that better sorting of plastics before recycling is needed to get better quality of finished products.

"In all recycling technologies, if shit goes in, shit comes out," Ragaert said. "So you need to de-shit-ify the waste."

ZWE's Simon advocated for more attention to reuse and waste prevention policies.

"When industry was asking for a blank check for chemical recycling, we said I don't think it's responsible because not all pyrolysis is the same," Simon said. "It depends on what you put in the cracker. There's different kinds of chemical recycling."

He called chemical recycling a "high-risk technology" because there are many unknowns about how it will work, and he advocated for more "low-risk, low-investment" solutions like waste prevention and packaging reuse.

Ragaert said the report has not taken into account failures of some technologies.

"We haven't accounted for failure yet," she said. "There is going to be a lot of failure along the way.

"A lot of these technologies, especially the ones being taken into account in the net zero scenarios, are really emerging technologies," Ragaert said. "We think they will get us there. We're not sure entirely."

A policy officer in the European Commission's environment directorate, Werner Bosmans, told the K audience that the commission will be coming out with tougher recycled-content standards in the commission's packaging waste directive, as well as revisiting rules around chemical recycling.

"You need to design for recycling, that is the first step and that is still not happening enough," Bosmans said. "That is in the interest of the industry, the economy and the environment.

"We really think that the industry needs to look at this more and more — we will start now with the proposed packaging legislation, where this will be very prominent," he said. "Then you'll need to close the circle, with recycled-content targets. We will come forward with recycled-content targets."

The panelists also debated single-use packaging regulations, including whether plastics were at times unfairly singled out.

Ragaert, of the University of Maastricht, said replacing single-use plastic just to replace plastics often does not make environmental sense.

"Nothing makes me angrier than throwaway paper cutlery, [which is sold] just because you can't make it in plastic anymore," she said. "It doesn't feel like a sustainable solution to me. It's very important that we realize that you shouldn't substitute [just] to substitute, but only when it makes sense."

She said she likes that the Plastics Europe report makes that point.

Ragaert questioned the European Commission's Single-Use Plastics directive, which called for phasing out 10 common plastics items, including single-use plastic plates, cutlery, straws and cotton bud sticks.

But Bosmans defended the directive, saying it was aimed at controlling litter, and for the items that were targeted, he said the nonplastic alternatives have less environmental impact when they are littered.

"The littering component needs to be taken into account, and if the littering is taken into account, this directive makes sense," Bosmans said. "No, it does not make sense to replace all plastics. I've never said that, and I would never say that.

"We first are always looking to reusable solutions; single-use is seldom the best way to go," he said. "Let's not make things that are easy to be thrown away on the streets. That's much, much more difficult because that moves the responsibility from consumers to producers."