How can we close the loop on used plastic?

European Circular Economy Leader at SABIC Dimitri Daniels shares insights into mechanical and advanced recycling - and beyond.

According to the latest statistics from the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), less than 10% of plastic waste makes its way to recycling centres, with the vast majority either ending up in landfill or sent for incineration. This approach has a detrimental effect on the environment and locks plastics out of the value chain, destroying any potential future value of used plastic.

If we want to create a circular economy for plastics, we must establish a value chain where used plastic is retained and re-used. There is no silver bullet solution, and a holistic approach must be taken that incorporates the various technologies and solutions available.

This means considering sustainability from the very start, at product design stage. It also means considering all potential recycling solutions, so that we reduce the volume of more complex plastics going to landfill or incineration. Finally, it also requires manufacturers, suppliers, and customers to come together to drive innovations that can make impact to help the challenges.

SABIC’s TRUCIRCLE™ portfolio and services is our flagship initiative for this holistic approach to improving the sustainability of plastic products, covering a range of services from design for recyclability to the mechanical and advanced recycling of plastics. Our ultimate aim through TRUCIRCLE is to give manufacturers access to more sustainable materials so that they can in turn create products that can be recycled and repurposed.While the challenges are broad and will take time to overcome, collaboration to innovate, upscale and implement new solutions for brands and consumers will be key to moving towards a circular economy for plastics.

Design for Recyclability

With up to 80% of a product’s environmental impacts determined at the design phase, effective product design is the first step to limiting the risk of plastics entering the environment and to addressing applicable regulatory compliance.

Growing consumer demand and the introduction of the new EU 2025 recycling regulations, which aim to ensure a 50% recycled plastic content in packaging, means there is a more urgent need than ever for sustainable packaging solutions that are designed with improved recyclability characteristics.

At SABIC we base our approach on three fundamental principles that manufacturers can focus on to help embed recyclability in packaging design:

1. Use mono-material designs to ensure ease of recycling (including barrier coating solutions).

2. Substitute hard-to-recycle materials for others that are more commonly recycled. For example, replacing polystyrene with polypropylene.

3. Incorporate innovative Conceptual Design concepts such as tracking or tagging, across industries and use Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a guiding principle for products and applications.

For example, in 2020 we launched a sustainable packaging solution for frozen food – TF-BOPE film - which combines a polyethylene (PE) grade with innovative film production technology. This packaging is 100% recyclable, and the reduced thickness also reduces environmental impact.

Advanced recycling made simple

A process which has a vital role in the production of demanding consumer products and in achieving a circular economy for plastics is advanced recycling. It is also important that it is seen as a complementary process to other waste management solutions such as mechanical recycling.

Mechanical recycling, the most mature of the recycling processes, is an efficient solution for high purity single-type polymers and will continue to play a vital role in helping the plastics industry to close the loop on used plastics.The role of advanced recycling comes in to help recycle the more challenging mixed, used plastics that mechanical recycling cannot for technical or economic reasons. This is why advanced recycling provides a vital new component to waste management systems. It can close the loop on plastic waste which, by traditional mechanical recycling methods, would otherwise have been sent to landfill or incinerated. A successful circular economy strategy must therefore incorporate both recycling processes.

As an example, the recycling of food-grade flexible plastic packaging has traditionally been a challenge for conventional recycling processes, but advanced recycling has made this possible.

In September last year, we announced a successful roll-out with Allied Bakeries, a major UK based supplier of bakery products, to produce the world’s first ever bread bags made in part from advanced recycled content in the packaging of their ‘Kingsmill No Crusts 50/50’. The bags incorporate a 30% content of recycled feedstock from post-consumer waste and were made by St. Johns packaging, a vertically integrated manufacturer of flexible packaging products.Also, our recent collaboration with Ella’s Kitchen, the UK’s number one baby food brand saw us create a new cap made from recycled plastic for two of their brands. The new packaging hit the shelves in January 2022, with over 3.5 million pouches fitted with the new cap made from recycled plastic from post-consumer waste.

Closing the loop

Value-chain collaborations also have a key role to play and have the potential to successfully create closed loop systems for used plastic.

Closed loop recycling of plastic would see post-consumer plastic waste collected, recycled and used to develop new products. However, for this vision to work, consumers, retailers, recyclers and manufacturers must work together to reclaim valuable materials from our waste stream and process them to make new products.

Whilst this requires a total transformation of the value chain both downstream and upstream, such collaboration is possible. Last year, SABIC completed a facemask recycling pilot project in Germany with Procter & Gamble (P&G) and the Fraunhofer Institute. The scheme involved collecting used masks worn by P&G employees or visitors to be sent to Fraunhofer for further processing at one of its pyrolysis plants. The resulting pyrolysis oil was then sent back to SABIC to be used as feedstock to produce new PP resin.

This can also be achieved in projects that involve consumers. At the end of 2020, SABIC was part of a trial with Tesco, Plastic Energy and packaging company Sealed Air that successfully demonstrated for the first time that flexible plastic can be continuously recycled into safe food-grade packaging. This was also the first flexible packaging to be made in part from materials returned by customers, in this case to ten Tesco stores across the UK. The scheme was so successful that Tesco increased the collection points to all stores nationwide during 2021.

Whilst there are seismic regulatory shifts which need to be made to enable this new circular business model on a wider scale, such as better consistency across recycling regulations between countries, the success of initial pilot projects is proof this collaboration can work.

A holistic approach to dealing with used plastic

If we are to establish a circular economy for plastics, we need to reinvent the value chain to be one where all used plastic can be retained and re-used.

Achieving this will require use of all the tools at our disposal: embedding sustainability into product design, scaling up advanced recycling infrastructure, and increasing collaboration across the supply chain.

By dealing with the challenges at each stage of the supply chain, from design through to post-consumer recycling, we can re-envision an industry-wide system that supports a circular economy for plastics.