In Talks, Oil Majors Press "Advanced Recycling" (The Other "Carbon Capture") As Impacts Of Plastics Keep Getting Worse

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Once formal proceedings begin in Nairobi, delegates will find themselves in the midst of a debate over advanced recycling between environmental advocates and industry representatives. Big Oil and the chemical industry are promoting advanced recycling as a way to help divert plastic waste from landfills and to offset the use of virgin fossil fuels for plastic production. Advanced, or chemical, recycling refers to a range of technologies that take waste plastic and turn it into chemical building blocks of new plastic, and often new fossil fuels and char, a waste residue.

The Environmental Protection Agency currently regulates two of these technologies—gasification and pyrolysis—as forms of plastic incineration. Environmentalists also argue that chemical recycling is in reality incineration—an energy intensive and polluting form of greenwashing that locks in a fossil fuel future at the expense of public health and the planet. Last week, 240 environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice, Greenpeace, Oceana and the Sierra Club, wrote a letter to President Joe Biden calling on his administration to end all support, including issuing permits, for chemical recycling of plastics.

“The chemical industry’s big lie is that it can solve the plastic crisis by incinerating plastic waste,” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy for NRDC. “Anyone who has ever accidentally burned even a tiny bit of plastic on the stove knows that this is both ludicrous and dangerous.” While the zero draft did not include a definition or discussion of advanced or chemical recycling, it did include recycling definitions that precluded turning plastic into fuel or using plastic for energy production.

A plastics treaty could, in the end, be silent on chemical recycling, relying on or referring to other global agreements or guidance that may have already been developed, such as the 1989 Basel Convention, which seeks to protect people and the planet from the adverse effects of hazardous wastes. Earlier this year, delegates negotiating a revision to technical guidelines for the Basel Convention did not accept language endorsing chemical recycling as a tool for managing plastic waste, at least for now. “What we saw is certain petrochemical interests, that is countries with significant petro and oil interests, promoting chemical recycling,” said Lee Bell, International Pollutants Elimination Network science policy advisor. Bell is the lead author of a new report from IPEN and Beyond Plastics on chemical recycling in the United States, “Chemical Recycling: A Dangerous Deception.”

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13112023/talks-plastic-treaty-advanced-recycling/