The European Union’s independent scientific research body isn’t convinced chemical recycling is a magic bullet solution to plastic pollution.
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre released a report last week that estimates plastics made with chemically recycled feedstock are between 1.5 and 3.5 times more expensive than plastics made from petrochemicals. And it “is expected to remain substantially more costly for the foreseeable future,” the authors wrote in the report.
Chemical recycling, also called advanced recycling, is a suite of technologies that use solvents or high heats to break hard-to-recycle plastics down to their chemical building blocks for future reuse.
In Europe, 80 percent of facilities use pyrolysis, a process in which plastics decompose in an oxygen-less chamber heated, on average, to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, the report found.
