Chemical companies, oil-and-gas incumbents and startups around the world are touting plans for new recycling facilities, promising to turn old bottles and bags into usable material. But policymakers are questioning whether some of these methods, broadly termed chemical or advanced recycling, should be considered recycling at all.

In 2024, Eastman Chemical began processing plastic at a new plant in Kingsport, Tenn., that it calls the largest material-to-material molecular recycling facility in the world. The company uses a chemical procedure called methanolysis to break down hard-to-recycle plastics and turn them into “virgin quality” polyesters. When operating at capacity, the facility will process 110,000 tons of plastic waste a year, the equivalent of 11 billion water bottles a year, said Mark Costa, Eastman’s chief executive. 
In July 2024, Australian company Samsara Eco announced a $65 million funding round that attracted investment from Singapore’s state-investment company Temasek and apparel company Lululemon, among others. Using a process it calls enzymatic recycling, it aims to recycle 1.5 million tons of plastic a year by 2030. 

Yet in June 2024, during last-minute negotiations on a New York state packaging bill that would have forced companies to meet ambitious recycling standards and reduce their packaging waste by 30%, state legislators agreed that technologies like Eastman’s or Samsara Eco’s would not initially be considered “recycling.”   “We had a serious concern about the pseudo solution pushed by the industry called chemical recycling,” said Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency official and founder of Beyond Plastics, an advocacy group that supported the bill. In a report published last October, Beyond Plastics raised doubts about advanced recycling plants’ yield, emissions, byproducts and energy use. The group has argued that advanced recycling amounts to little more than a marketing tactic deployed to distract decision makers from proven waste-reduction methods, like using less packaging… 

A recent ProPublica investigation found that the dominant advanced recycling technique, pyrolysis, yields 15% to 20% usable plastic materials. The rest turns into fuel and other chemicals. Traditional mechanical recycling yields 55% to 85% new plastic…

Excerpts from Claire Brown, A Fight Over the Future of Recycling Brews as Plastics Legislation Gains Traction, WSJ, July 2, 2024