The Future of Plastic: it’s time for optimism
In this guest blog, Nick Cliffe, Deputy Challenge Director of the Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge, UK Research and Innovation discusses the future of plastics.
In the final scenes of the 1981 film, Time Bandits the situation for the protagonists is looking bleak, Evil personified is preparing to unleash its ultimate power when, at the last moment, the Supreme Being arrives and in a flash of light Evil is reduced to a black, smouldering mass. This material is ‘concentrated evil’ and even to touch it results in instant death.
For many of us working in in the polymer industry today it can feel like that’s how the world currently views plastic. Every day seems to bring fresh news, commentary, campaigns and boycotts which focus only on negative outcomes from our use of plastics, whether as an environmental pollutant or a hazard to living creatures. But, I don’t believe that plastic is intrinsically evil, it is instead our relationship with plastic that leads to these narratives.
Plastic is a fundamental building block of our society, underpinning many of our systems, from food production, distribution and prevention of food waste to medicines and provision of healthcare. From the provision of clean, safe drinking water to the construction of safe and energy efficient homes, plastics play a fundamental role in modern life. Plastics are integral to achieving the UK Government’s clean growth objects and the global shift away from the high carbon emission, petrochemical system to the zero emission future. Plastics play an important role in wind, solar and other forms of low carbon energy production. It is therefore imperative that we change our relationship to these materials and develop a more circular approach to their use. However, plastic’s best qualities often work against it.
Plastics are, lightweight, strong and efficient, a little material goes a long way and provides a lot of functionality. These qualities mean that an individual plastic item doesn’t add much to the weight of a recycling collection in systems where performance is measured by weight. Moreover, plastics’ versatility and diverse properties and performance, from lightweight food packaging applications to underground pipes to aircraft wings. But this diversity means that at the end of its life the plastic waste stream is more diverse than any other, making recycling and recovery challenging and expensive. Many plastics are cost effective (or cheap if you like) but this means that the value of recovered plastics is often very low.
There are many approaches and areas for research and innovation to address these challenges that UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) programmes are supporting, including plastic’s three Rs. Reduce is being addressed through innovation in light-weighting and design. Reuse is more challenging, but as an approach it does seem to be gaining acceptance in the market, from reusable shopping bags, water bottles and beverage cups at the level of the individual consumer to the increased reuse of bulk containers and refillable product delivery systems in the grocery supply chain.
The R with the most focus at the moment is Recycle. Recycling plastic is a multi-step process and innovation is taking place at all steps. New sorting technologies using advanced photonics, such as redesigned near infrared-red cameras to identify plastic by type and colour can facilitate high-speed and accurate sorting. Invisible markers are also being developed which can be applied to plastics to provide additional information which sorting systems can detect but don’t impact on the appearance or performance of the product. This could be used to allow high-speed high-accuracy sorting of plastic packaging or to identify automotive plastic components which contain particular additives such as fire retardants from others which don’t. The more effective the sorting of plastics the higher quality, value and ‘use-ability’ of the recyclate, for example new approaches to shredding using cryogenic techniques are reducing losses. This increases yields for recyclers and improves the economic viability of recycling.
The most significant development in recycling is the development and commercialisation of chemical recycling technologies. At present, the majority of plastic recycling is termed ‘mechanical recycling’, where the plastic itself is preserved in polymeric form; the output can be very pure and high-quality, but it will never be quite the same as virgin polymer. However, with chemical recycling the polymer chains themselves are broken back down to the monomers from which they were made, and these can then be remade into what is, in effect, virgin polymer. There are a number of systems developed and being trialled in the marketplace, ranging from pyrolysis (thermal decomposition) techniques to using solvent-based approaches. In some cases, these technologies are being deployed at recycling sites, in others they are being integrated into polymer manufacturing facilities.
UKRI are actively funding research and innovation in plastics, in particular the Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge, part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. This £60M investment in R&D will run until 2024 and will deliver a core programme to support networking and collaboration building; it will invest in fundamental research to deliver greater understanding in areas such as the impact of plastic pollution on the environment and consumer behaviour. The fund will also co-invest with industry across a series of funding competitions, ranging from early-stage research to first-of-a-kind demonstrator projects.
For more information about our work in this area please consider joining the UK Circular Plastics Network via www.ukcpn.co.uk and for more information about UKRI and the challenges please visit https://www.ukri.org/innovation/industrial-strategy-challenge-fund/smart-sustainable-plastic-packaging/