PlasticsToBio Initiative – The future of plastics is circular and biobased
Type of post: PROJECT PROFILE.
PlasticsToBio is a concept
developed by AFRY that could lead
to the largest transformation in the history of petrochemicals and the restructuring
of businesses and redistribution of value. Basically, it is all about building the
understanding that in the first place we can decouple plastics from fossils and
turn them all into biobased via recycling. This will also mean that biobased
plastics will become cheaper than fossil plastics today, if the process is done
right and in large enough scale and ambition.
This post is
based on the brochure “PlasticsToBio – an affordable, economically viable
concept and initiative to decouple plastics from fossils” published by AFRY to make
known its initiative PlasticsToBio.
The
information is reproduced with permission of the authors.
I would like
to express my appreciation to Tomi Nyman (Principal at AFRY, tomi.nyman@poyry.com) for his kind
collaboration.
1. The plastics problem
The annual plastics production
will soon reach 400 million tons. Unless we take action, we will produce over 1
billion tons in 2050. Even if we take all the known possible measures, the
growth will be so immense that we will reach a level of 700-800 million tons of
plastics of annual production by 2050. This is driven not only by the
population growth, which is set to grow by 50% in the next 30 years, but also
by the growth of the middle class. The number of middle-class citizens, living
in highly urban areas, is set to grow by 2 billion in the same period. Given
all this, the global plastics problem is crying out for a solution. Unless
mankind starts to take responsibility for the waste, we will drown in plastics,
and all sorts of other waste, in no time.
2. The solution
The plastics problems can be
solved. Technologies are available, it is just a matter of will. Besides
solving the problems related to plastics, we can make the conversion to
biobased materials in an affordable, economically viable manner. Three things
are needed:
(1) to collect all plastics
after use, whether they are used for 1 second or for over 100 years;
(2) to recycle all plastics,
mechanically and chemically, to make new products from recycled materials
instead of virgin crude oil origin;
(3) to start feeding the
production with bio-based content to finally decouple from fossil origin
feedstock.
Figure 1. Wheel of plastic –
The new plastics era. An affordable, economically viable concept to decouple
plastics from fossil raw materials and reduce 1 gigaton of emissions.
2.1 Plastics collection
Today in the Nordic countries and Germany as
much as 97% of beverage bottles are returned and collected after use for
recycling. This is largely due to an efficient deposit scheme and organized equipment
infrastructure and logistics.
How can we make the same happen for plastics
and collect them after using with the same intensity? Take ketchup bottles,
meat packaging, 20-year old car bumpers and dashboards, plastics films and
pipes from demolished buildings. They all contain valuable plastic raw
materials that should be collected up and recycled. Let’s forget about plastic
as material and think about money. If a piece of plastic litter is on the street,
over 90% of the people walk past. If a dollar note is on the street, 100% will
pick it up. The misconception that a piece of plastic is not valuable is very
strong in our minds. We need to educate everyone that each single piece of
plastic is worth picking up, collecting and returning to recycling.
Around the world there is almost 8 billion tons
of plastics in the environment (being used, in landfills and dumped in nature).
With no much effort we can collect, say, 50 million tons of this plastic every year.
Today, people discard majority of the plastics they use, but we should target a
low, single-digit number in terms of leakage to the environment. We cannot,
unfortunately, avoid mistakes and accident which will cause leakage to the
environment but even those plastics could eventually be recovered later.
The deposit scheme in practice
Several schemes are already in use in various
countries either on national or retail chain level. A partnership and value
chain is set up between the retailers and recyclers in such a way that when a
consumer buys a product from a store, a deposit value of e.g. $0.1 is charged
by the cashier to the consumer for the packaging. When returning the used
packaging to the allocated shops, the bar code is read by a collection machine,
which then returns either money or a receipt which indicates the deposited
value. This amount of money can then be discounted from the next purchase in
the same store. The returned plastic packaging is then regularly collected,
transported and sorted for recycling and material reuse. In this way, the
scheme demonstrates to consumers that the plastic packaging has a value and
should not be discarded, but instead returned to the shop for recycling.
2.2 Plastics recycling
Today we are aware of some, mostly grey,
recycled plastic products. The quality of recycled materials is set to improve
as technologies develop. Mechanical recycling requires intense sorting
according to plastic type followed by washing and regranulation. Sorting is typically
done by near infrared, middle range infrared or magnetic flotation techniques.
In practice, all plastics can be recycled mechanically, yet plastics like PE,
PP and PET are the most convenient. In the recycling of industrial, clean
grades, the final recycled plastic is very close to the original due to minimal
contamination. In post-consumer resins (PCR) the collected plastics contain
remainders of food, soil and chemicals and so the quality is not uniform,
leaving the end product grey and often with an odour.
The limitations of mechanical recycling has led
to the development of chemical recycling techniques: hydropyrolysis and
pyrolysis followed by catalytic hydrotreatment, gasification followed by
Fischer-Trospch, selective solvent extraction… Mechanical recycling leads to
the gradual degradation of the polymers as the chains are cut shorter. Chemical
recycling, however, going back to the hydrocarbon or monomers, is capable of
recovering all the properties of the virgin plastic. It is estimate that in
large scale 50% of plastics can be recycled mechanically and 50% would need
chemical recycling.
2.3 Biobased plastics
There are many biobased raw materials available
in the world but today only 500-600 million tons are used every year. Roughly
one third of this volume is vegetable oils and animal fats, the largest single
product types being palm oil, soybean oil and rapeseed/canola oils. The vast
majority is used for food although an increasing amount is ending up in second
use, for example as fuels for heating, in biodiesel and renewable diesel. In addition,
large amounts of sugar and cellulose are grown. Sugar is used for food, fuels,
plastics and chemicals and cellulose primarily for paper and board purposes.
In discussing whether biobased raw materials
should be used for food or fuel, we must again take a holistic approach.
Traffic and energy sectors are undergoing major restructuring and although the
growing population will need more food in the future, it may still be that 10%
of the production of natural oils and sugars can be made available for plastic
applications. Today, for example, 70% of rape seed oil is used for traffic
fuels in Europe. Does it make sense to burn this virgin natural oil based fuel
once, or should we convert it first into plastics, which are then recycled
mechanically 5-7 times and chemically 3-5 times before the molecules are
converted into energy and only then let it escape the circular system? It is
obvious that keeping the material recirculating as many times as possible makes
sense and incineration is just ultimate recourse in cases when plastics can no
longer be recycled.
3. From fossil to biobased plastics
Today the amount of plastics production that is
100% biobased is roughly 1 million tons per annum and total production with any
biobased content is only about 2-3 million tons per year. Just imagine if we
could scale up the biobased feedstock to a level that would result in 40
million tons of biobased plastics. This would mean that every year 10% of all
plastics produced would be biobased.
Then, if we are absolutely meticulous in
collecting and recycling the plastics back from the market after use, this 10%
will start to circulate. Next year, we again add another 40 million tons and
the 10% starts to accumulate gradually. If the overall production of plastics
remains stable, in 10 years fossil plastics would account for only 13% of all
plastics produced. With a 5% market growth in plastics production, it would
take 12 years to reach a similar level.
So we have shown how we can decouple plastics
from fossil feedstock practically in 10 years. Why is this not being done yet?
Many refer to the cost as the reason, but that may not ultimately be the right
argument.
4. The investment and the savings
Figure 2. Reshaping the plastics production
according to circular bioeconomy enables annual savings of US$100 billion
We can invest annually:
- US$20 billion in collection and waste
management. We need to educate people, build new infrastructure for collection,
sorting and logistics.
- US$25 billion in mechanical and chemical
recycling assets and bio-based feedstock production assets. Addressing the
plastics challenge naturally requires recycling sites. These can be established
by converting existing oil refining assets for the use of mechanical and
chemical recycling processes and in new recycling assets.
- US$60 billion in biobased feedstock,
hydrocarbons from oils, sugars, cellulose and wastes. This is the magnitude of investment
that is needed to keep up with the pace at which plastics demand is currently
growing if we want to decouple plastics from fossil crude oil.
- US$15 billion in additional operating
expenses due to more complexity, more people to operate the sites, run sales
and logistics operation. New and converted sites may be more complex compared
to the old operation at least in the beginning.
- US$55-80 billion in the textile market. It
will be decoupled from fossil products partly as materials gets sold into that
market from the same pool. After use, also the synthetic textile polymers
return to the system for recycling.
- US$50 billion in additional energy, in new
renewable energy production and incineration of difficult-to-recycle plastics
and methane from chemical recycling.
- And, negligence and accidents leading to
environmental leakage of plastics may cause a loss of US$20 billion.
Summing up all the above costs and investments
required to replace fossil with biobased plastics in this very simplified
top-down model, we end up with a sum of US$190 billion per year (considering 100%
recovery rate of synthetic textiles). If we take a crude oil price level
typically used in various scenarios at $70/barrel, with fossil naphtha price of
US$ 600-700/mt and shale ethane at 35 cents/gallon, we pay US$300 billion per
year today. Ultimately, the society can save over US$100 billion every year by
creating a circular economy and a biobased feedstock in a well-managed manner
and recycled bio-based plastics could become cheaper that the fossil plastics
we use today.
5. AFRY offering in PlasticToBio
AFRY has a clear view on how
this can be implemented and with what investment and timetable, proposing
regional solutions to different locations depending on the type of waste
available and the current infrastructure. Companies around the world are keen
to begin this task of solving the world’s plastics problems and preventing us
from drowning in plastics. AFRY is approaching companies active in oil refining
and plastics production, biobased feedstock and bioplastic producers, waste
management companies, technology providers, mechanical and chemical recyclers
for plastics, retailers and brand-owners. Our ambitions must be high if we are
to achive these challenging objectives.
Figure 3. AFRY offering in
PlasticToBio
