Advances in Feedstock Recycling Offer Help with Plastic Waste

Abstract

An idea whose time has come takes center stage in London this week when BP Chemicals announces details of a consortium of chemical companies joining it in a new recycling project. In the project, which BP has been working on since 1989, waste plastic will be depolymerized to chemical feedstocks, via technology variously called feedstock or chemical recycling, polymer cracking, or tertiary recycling. BP's effort is one of the first to emerge from the research and pilot-plant stages that are committed to actual feedstock recycling of mixed polyolefins and other plastics. But it is only one of the many industry efforts under way to cope with the messy job of dealing with postconsumer plastics—those piles of mixed plastic waste that the consuming public tosses out day after day. The technology of using chemolysis processes for depolymerizing single condensation polymers—urethanes, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), nylon, and polymethyl methacrylates, for example— is relatively straightforward. But ...