Goodbye waste!
Landfills are treasure troves for raw materials that should be treated as a valuable resource rather than being despised. The textile industry has long since realized this. Major chains are advertising their commitment to sustainable fashion. Their garments have labels attached to them that say things like: “I used to be a PET bottle. I am made from 100 percent recycled polyester.” What the chains neglect to mention is that only certain pure plastics can be used. Contaminated and even mixed plastics are out of the question, but it is these types of plastics that make up the majority of the waste.
LANXESS knows all about recycling and is relying on maximum efficiency and resource utilization. Iron oxide pastes are one example of this. They are generated during aniline production and are used as valuable raw materials for the production of pigments. It is a closed system where no raw material and little energy is lost. While it is hardly possible to increase the level of efficiency at the plants, the process is based on fossil – and thus finite – resources.
Chemical recycling is one element of the solution to the problem. “It’s the ultimate skill,” says Philipp Junge, Head of the New Mobility and Circular Economy group initiative at LANXESS. “If implemented perfectly, it is the best way to conserve finite resources. The existing plastic is broken down into its basic chemical elements.” These can then be put together again in a different way to create a new product – with the best quality and without limitations. While it sounds perfect in theory and has been achieved on a small scale in the lab, implementing it on an industrial scale is a very difficult undertaking. Breaking down the plastic into its original building blocks is a technical challenge. In the long term, the process will be a mixture of various technological procedures that complement each other perfectly. Ideally, chemical, mechanical, and other physical and solvent-based recycling methods will go hand in hand with the recycling or maintenance of used materials.
©photka - stock.adobe.comSymbiosis with other recycling procedures – it’s all in the mix!
The names of the procedures used in chemical recycling already hint at their complexity: pyrolysis, oiling, solvolysis. What is fascinating about these procedures is that they use the carbon contained in the plastic waste, making the use of fossil carbon sources unnecessary. After all, most plastics are petroleum-based. Chemical recycling reuses the fossil components contained in the plastic again and again and hardly requires any new ones. However, only some types of plastic, such as polystyrene (PS) or polyethylene terephthalate (PET), can be broken down all the way to the monomers. Monomers are the basic building blocks, that is, the smallest recurring units that form the polymers. However, chemical recycling usually yields mixtures of various fragments: molecules such as those found in petroleum and natural gas. Companies then use this artificial oil to create plastics and chemicals.All this is already possible today, just not on a large scale. There are still many obstacles relating to the approval processes or the question of economic efficiency. If the waste is made up of many different materials, breaking it down into its basic components is a complex task.
Working on innovative solutions with strong partners
“It takes strong partners and cross-industry cooperation along the products’ value chains to turn the theoretical concept into reality,” Philipp Junge explains. Together with other industrial partners, LANXESS is campaigning for using innovative technologies in larger pilot plants. Such a pilot project in Terneuzen in the Netherlands is demonstrating that physical recycling on a larger scale is indeed possible. The plant processes up to 3,000 tons of insulation materials per year such that the raw materials can be returned to the cycle.Blueprint for further projects: insulation materials returned to the cycle
If you have ever renovated or torn down an old building, you probably encountered insulating materials that are classified as hazardous waste these days. Some of these materials are toxic and harmful to the environment. The classic example is polystyrene to which the flame retardant HBCD has been added. It is a heterogeneous product from which the flame retardant could not be separated for a long time. In the end, it was simply burned.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging has found a solution in cooperation with CreaCycle GmbH. They developed a path to safely separate the flame retardant from the expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam). In the process, it turned out that even the HBCD can be used. When broken down thermally, it releases bromine, which is an important raw material for the industry. It is collected and can then start its journey into the circular economy – just like the now HBCD-free polystyrene solution.
These processes are now carried out by the pilot plant in Terneuzen – a successful example of how the expertise of the chemical industry combined with the latest research results and support from the EU can lead to an important breakthrough.
LANXESS and its industrial partners are also working on materials that facilitate chemical recycling, i.e. can be broken down into their basic substances more quickly and at a lower cost. This is already the case with the polyamide (PA6) and polybutylene terephthalate (PBT) plastics that are contained in a number of products of LANXESS brand Tepex. But this is just the beginning. Philipp Junge: “Our aim is to make recycling products easier at all levels. We are also using the knowledge of the data scientists working at the company. For example, we want to use algorithms and artificial intelligence to develop an entirely new type of products. This will allow us to take recyclability into account during product development and make products that can be almost completely separated back into their original components at the end of their lifecycle with as little effort as possible.”
Like many other European plastics manufacturers, LANXESS has committed itself to strive for high reuse and recycling rates of 60 percent by 2030. The industry is making its contribution here, as demonstrated by the pilot plant in the Netherlands. But there is still room for improvement. Waste must be assigned a value and be recycled consistently instead of being disposed of. In order to establish a comprehensive circular economy, we need to achieve a mind shift along the entire value chain. The industry cannot accomplish this alone, but only in combination with a new political framework. This includes shorter and less bureaucratic approval processes, for example for new recycling plants, financial support for innovative technologies, and realistic objectives defined by the government.
