Advanced recycling: a path for closing the circular economy

 

 

*Fabiana Quiroga, director of Circular Economy for South America at Braskem

Plastic is an indispensable material in our modern life and plays a big role in various sectors of our economy, such as helping to reduce food waste, advancing universal accesss to basic sanitation, expanding our electric power network, as well as many other advantages. However, our society is still evolving in issues related to managing its waste and conscientious consumerism. In this light, projects to advance and develop recycling processes are fundamental to ensuring a more sustainable future.

One of these initiatives is advanced recycling, a process that transforms plastic waste into circular raw materials that are used to make new products, whether plastics or chemicals, while reducing the amount of waste disposed of in the environment. The process comes to complement traditional mechanical recycling, since it allows for recycling plastics that are difficult to separate while creating final products with the same characteristics as conventional products, in other words, with a greater diversity of applications.

Despite its benefits, advanced recycling is still in the development phase and only exists on a small scale. According to the consulting firm McKinsey , the supply of products from its process could grow from 4% to 8% of total demand for polymers by 2030 and require investment of more than US$ 40 billion over the next decade. The study also shows that advanced recycling has the potential to register annual growth of around 20% by 2030. As we can see, this front offers a vast range of opportunities.

These are technological advances with the capacity to meet the urgent calls from various segments of society, such as the demand for recycled polymers to make packaging for the consumer goods industry - which is being driven by growing consumer awareness and by the sustainability targets of companies in the production chain - and, most importantly, the urgent need to expand our recycling capacity on a global scale to help avoid plastic waste from being disposed of in landfills or in the environment and being lost in the production cycle. Also according to McKinsey, over 80 global companies in the consumer goods, packaging and retailing sectors have undertaken public commitments to include between 15% and 50% recycled content in their packaging by 2025.

Here in Brazil, we recycled around 23% of plastic packaging in 2020, according to data from the Brazilian Plastics Industry Association (Abiplast). We must increase this amount substantially in order to reach a more sustainable future. To achieve this, new partners and investments already are being made to ensure that processes involving advanced recycling are recognized, multiply and become more robust. Thanks to the collective efforts of organizations engaged in sustainable development and the circular economy, this progress is being expanded in various areas around the world.

Aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and focused on fostering the circular economy, Braskem sees great potential in this field. Currently, the company is working in partnership with highly qualified companies to develop new initiatives that help to join the links in the production chain and to create solutions for a more sustainable tomorrow. Braskem has undertaken the goals to eliminate, by 2030, 1.5 million tons of plastic waste that would have been sent for incineration, to landfills or discarded in the environment, and to expand its production and marketing of products with recycled content to 1 million tons by the same year.

To meet these goals, Braskem announced, in the first half of 2022, important investments. One of these investments, of around R$44 million, was for the construction of the first advanced recycling plant in Brazil, in partnership with Valoren, a company that develops technology and manages solid waste for transforming it into recycled products. The unit will have production capacity to produce 6,000 tons of recycled resins per year. On another front, in the United States, Braskem acquired a minority interest in Nexus Circular , a company engaged in converting plastics that are difficult to recycle and destined for landfills into circular raw materials used to make plastics with quality on par with that of conventional plastics.

The challenges have been laid down and the journey will be long. To build a future in which more plastics can be recycled, we know it is fundamental for various actors of society to come together and join forces. Whether in the public sphere, in private organizations or even in our homes, with the investments made in these new technologies, we now have the choices to carry us into an even more sustainable world: all we have to do is to dispose of plastics properly to ensure that they are recycled. That is the shared responsibility of all of us and that will make a huge difference.