Chemical recycling of plastics could be problematic for developing countries that have limited capacity to manage and regulate waste.
That, at least, was the opinion of experts at a June 26 forum looking at how the plastics treaty should approach a technology that industry sees as crucial to improving the circularity of plastics but that environmentalists are deeply skeptical of.
The forum was held to release a study, commissioned by the environment ministry of Switzerland and prepared by Germany's RWTH Aachen University, that aims to provide baseline data and recommendations on chemical recycling to the ongoing global plastics treaty talks.
It was released at a forum and webinar held during meetings of the Basel Convention, a United Nations body that regulates global trade in hazardous waste, in Geneva.
Experts noted the complexities, but several of them also argued for caution in introducing chemical recycling plants into developing countries.
An environmental adviser from Angola, for example, told the forum it would be "a bit challenging" for countries like his with limited capacity for managing waste "to come to that solution of chemical recycling."
"Being like my country, like my continent and some other developing countries, being countries that are net importers of plastic products and many times used like dumping sites from developed countries … we easily will concentrate in the consequences of chemical recycling," said Santos Virgilio, technical adviser the Angolan environment ministry.
An executive with plastics toy maker Lego A/S told the webinar audience that there can be a role for chemical recycling in managing plastics waste, but said they also supported Angola's cautious tone in how the technology should be treated in developing countries.
"Listening to ... Virgilio just now, we would also agree that chemical recycling plants operations need to be very carefully considered when thinking about environmental health, human health and the risk of dumping when circularity doesn't work," said Jon Khoo, an environmental policy lead with Lego.
He said it's a topic that should be taken up in the plastics treaty talks.
The study's main author, RWTH Aachen University's Peter Goerg Quicker, said chemical recycling may be problematic and release pollutants into the environment in countries with insufficient or uncontrolled waste management.
But Quicker also said that in countries with "strict environmental regulations like in Europe, North America, Japan or Australia, I think these processes will have no harm for the environment because they are comparable to other industrial plants, to waste incineration, to cement kilns, and should be regulated as those plants."
A technical adviser to the International Pollutants Elimination Network, however, argued that the technology should not be used either in developing or developed countries, because of hazardous waste production and low yields of useful material.
IPEN adviser Lee Bell said that putting chemical recycling plants in developing countries could increase the export of plastic waste.
"There's a high risk of driving plastic waste exports to developing countries, which have poorer regulation, which may lead to emissions impacts and hazardous waste risks to public health," Bell said. "If you set up these facilities in developing countries, there will be the argument that you can export under different aspects of the Basel Convention for recycling."
But Lego's Khoo, who noted that his company is a member of the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, argued that chemical recycling that's controlled properly can play a role, particularly in keeping harder-to-recycle plastics out of landfills or the environment.
"We welcome the study … as a good reality check on where chemical recycling currently is at, for it is only in its early days, it's not a developed field," said Khoo, adding that the study showed the technology is not a "magic bullet."
He said Lego is listening to both the chemical recycling industry and to environmental groups and wants to put the technology into a waste management hierarchy where some chemical recycling processes are better than others, and where waste-to-fuel processes are not considered recycling.
"We do feel chemical recycling has a role to play but we need to be careful in assessing that, looking at the hierarchies we should follow and looking to make informed choices," he said.
A diplomat from Ecuador, who noted that his country chairs the plastics treaty's intergovernmental negotiating committee, said nations have a knowledge gap around chemical recycling.
"To control it, we need to know more about it," said Walter Schuldt, Ecuador's minister to U.N. offices in Geneva. "The message is that we also need to keep developing studies on its risks, impacts, effectiveness, feasibilities and cost effectiveness."
He said countries in the treaty should work harder to avoid producing plastic products that are hard-to-recycle, seeing that as an alternative approach that would reduce the need for chemical recycling technologies at the end of a product's life cycle.
He urged those attending the Basel meeting to push their governments to work on provisions in the plastics treaty draft text that call for identifying and avoiding problematic plastic products.
"You need to push your delegations to work on that, because the main part of the solution is to avoid having to deal with the new technologies to deal with the problem that we have created and keep creating every day," Schuldt said.