By Ross Headifen Ph.D
It is becoming clear that our management of plastic waste is woefully underperforming. We have set targets many years in advance for recyclability, being recycled and recycled content in new products. However, as we approach these target dates, report after report tells us that we will not only miss the targets but miss them by significant amounts. So much so that recycling of plastics waste has changed little since the targets were set six years ago.
There are some exciting things happening for plastic waste, but their scales are still small for this discussion.
Recent articles on waste management were published citing:
- An additional 650,000 tonnes a year of waste, including plastic, paper, glass, and tyres, will flood Australia’s recycling industry when the full waste export ban comes into effect in mid-2024, according to the Library of Congress. Landfill will likely be the destination for many of the plastics, particularly film, without mechanical drivers for a circular economy.
- The CSIRO says that just a 5 per cent boost to the recycling rate per year would create many jobs and add to the GDP. It also estimates that $100 billion would be required to get recycling rates up to 20-30 per cent by 2030
- Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO) reported recycling problems are clear enough, including that the collection, sorting, and reprocessing of materials, amounting to millions of tonnes of packaging, is uneconomical. It is clear that business as usual will not cut it.
It is interesting to look at some scenarios of plastic waste and the amount that will be recycled per year for the years to come. Australia uses approximately four million tonnes of plastic per year. The consumption of plastic is forecast to grow by at least three per cent per a year, i.e. doubling by 2050 with some saying it will triple (4.2 per cent growth per annum).
To keep plastic waste out of a landfill it has to be:
1) Made part of a circular economy where the plastic waste is returned to manufacturers to make similar products from it.
2) Burned in a waste-to-energy plant, of which there are only two about to commence operations in WA.
3) Repurposed to a use where it will be lost forever, such as road base.
Currently the amount of plastic recycled is claimed to be around 15 per cent. But this included repurposing of plastic to other end-use functions, which is not the circular economy. The amount that is recycled and returned to original plastic manufacturers is much less.
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Assume for this story it is two per cent. Let’s first look at first the business-as-usual situation of recycling increasing at an aspirational five per cent per year over the previous year. Becoming more aggressive, imagine we were able to increase recycling over that of the above by a factor of five year-on-year to 20 per cent increase per year.
Here it assumes that there will always be some residual plastic waste of approximately 20 per cent that will never be recycled, and the recycling rate goes up in line with the usage rate once 80 per cent recycling is reached. This scenario has the actual recycled rate at six per cent by 2030 if we get very optimistic and spend the $100 billion to get recycling up to 20 per cent by 2030. This would require increasing the recycling rate year-on-year by 43 per cent. Given our history this would be a very difficult number to reach.
What these plots graphs (below) show is that there will be considerable blue areas for the next decade or more and still significant blue areas or plastic going to landfill (or perhaps waste-to-energy plants at that time), for years after that, no matter what scenario is modelled.
These models show there is an important need for the next decade and beyond, to make plastic that can biodegrade away in a landfill as that is most likely where the waste will end up. As it biodegrades it will supply energy to the power plants using its biogas.
A seamless transition
The landfill biodegradable technology is the only technology that can oversee this transition from having to landfill plastic waste to operating in a more circular economy. Landfill biodegradable plastics will biodegrade in landfills at an accelerated rate compared to conventional plastics allowing some of their embodied energy to be utilised, yet still retain mainstream recyclability for when they can be recycled.