Recycling is tricky business
MEASURES to address the enormous amount of plastic waste the world creates on a daily basis have become popular in the past year or so, including here in the Philippines, where the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Act is now in effect. The idea that we need to find some way to reduce plastic waste is obviously quite sensible, but as with most basically sensible notions about limiting or reversing human damage to the environment, there are big obstacles along the path from idea to action.
In the case of plastic waste management, those obstacles are, on the one hand, pushback from the petrochemical and plastics manufacturing industry and, on the other, the perhaps more difficult challenge of making the “circular economy” involving plastics actually economically viable.
The first problem is certainly not an insignificant one; industry lobbying was powerful enough to kill what at first seemed like a promising effort to create a global plastics treaty last year. However, solving it may not be as daunting as it seems at first glance because the industry’s motivations are very simple. Business is business, and unless alternatives to untrammeled plastic consumption — which the industry relies on — offer opportunities instead of threats, they’re naturally going to resist them. By the same token, the industry can be very supportive when an apparent opportunity arises; it continues to make money one way or the other and can burnish its otherwise sketchy reputation.
Creating those opportunities is proving to be a great deal more difficult than anyone anticipated, if recent news from the US state of Oregon is any indication. In a brief announcement last week, the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative (OBRC) said that it was laying off a “small” but unspecified number of employees “due to changes in our business environment.”
Oregon has one of the oldest “bottle laws” in the US, which mandates that customers pay a deposit when purchasing beverages in plastic containers to encourage them to return them for recycling, at which time their deposit is refunded. The program has worked pretty well in terms of the amount of plastic collected; about 80 percent of deposits are paid out to consumers. One of the reasons the Oregon law has worked is that the beverage distributors were brought on board from the outset; OBRC is a nonprofit created by the distributors in 2009 to manage the state’s deposit return system.
The OBRC did not provide details about what the “changes in our business environment” actually are, but a little bit of digging into the state of the market suggests some factors that allow one to make a pretty good guess.
First of all, the only types of plastic that are economically viable at all as recyclables are PET (polyethylene terephthalate, which is identified with a “1” inside the triangular recycling symbol stamped on the bottle or container); HDPE (high-density polyethylene, which is “2”); and to a lesser extent, polypropylene (or PP, marked with a “5”). These require the least amount of reprocessing and can be remanufactured into similar products as the originals. However, that reprocessing and remanufacturing are both energy-intensive and expensive; depending on oil prices, making a recycled item may cost three or four times what it costs to make a new one from virgin raw materials. A more cost-effective way to handle them is to recycle them into less complex products, such as disposal plastic bags or packaging materials.
It is possible to recycle other types of plastic, but because of their complexity, the processes are even more costly. So, at best, these end up simply being ground into the euphemistically named “resource-based fuel” and used in various waste-to-energy or industrial applications, such as cement mills. This happens to a large proportion of the PET, HDPE and PP that is collected as well, simply because it’s easier and more cost-effective as demand for the economically sensible second-life products of recycled plastics rapidly diminishes. Most markets are quickly moving away from using things like plastic grocery bags.
Even as waste fuel, the supply of recovered plastics dwarfs the demand. Some potential users are reluctant to try it for various technical reasons, and any form of incineration, whether it is applied to a cement kiln, generator, metal smelter or just burning trash to make it go away, naturally meets with a lot of resistance anywhere it is proposed. As it should be because if there was anything that could be described as a “less than ideal solution,” it’s burning plastic to get rid of it.
Most plastic waste management proposals, EPR programs, or “bottle bills,” or whatever form they take, do not adequately consider the entire life cycle of plastic products. The green-carpet types who make the most noise about it simply assume that segregating the trash and sending the plastic away to be recycled makes it disappear in some magical black hole, but even those who take the problem more seriously and go a step further to suggest how plastic should be recycled do not consider the economics of the problem. Yes, I agree that capitalism is a crappy system, but you have to work with what you’ve got; the basic mathematics of business cannot simply be ignored.
The problem of making plastic waste management economically viable appears to be even more difficult than even a pessimist like me anticipated. Consider this: The OBRC is operating a program that is reasonably effective in the context of its underlying law’s objective, which is to prevent potentially recyclable plastic from simply ending up in a landfill or as litter. The organization is a nonprofit group, so it is not trying to actually make money; as a matter of fact, records indicate it is substantially underwritten by the beverage distributor businesses since that’s an easy way to satisfy CSR obligations. Yet despite all that, the cooperative still has to lay off people because it cannot cover its operating costs. In that light, the prospects for the EPR program in the laissez-faire-to-a-fault environment in this country, where the assumption is the recycling system will somehow be a going concern and attract investment, are not very good unless those concerned are willing to sit down and comprehensively rethink the idea.