A breakthrough in plastic recycling is coming up short

By 2025, Nestle promises not to use any plastic in its products that isn’t recyclable. By that same year, L’Oreal says all of its packaging will be “refillable, reusable, recyclable or compostable.”

And by 2030, Procter & Gamble pledges that it will halve its use of virgin plastic resin made from petroleum.

To get there, these companies and others are promoting a new generation of recycling plants, called “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, that promise to recycle many more products than can be recycled today.

So far, advanced recycling is struggling to deliver on its promise. Nevertheless, the new technology is being hailed by the plastics industry as a solution to an exploding global waste problem.

The traditional approach to recycling is to simply grind up and melt plastic waste. The new, advanced-recycling operators say they can break down the plastic much further, into more basic molecular building blocks, and transform it into new plastic.

PureCycle Technologies, a company that features prominently in Nestlé, L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble’s plastics commitments, runs one such facility: a US$500 million plant in Ironton, Ohio. The plant was originally to start operating in 2020, with the capacity to process as much as 182 tons of discarded polypropylene, a hard-to-recycle plastic used widely in single-use cups, yogurt tubs, coffee pods and clothing fibers, every day.

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But PureCycle’s recent months have instead been filled with setbacks: technical issues at the plant, shareholder lawsuits, questions over the technology and a startling report from contrarian investors who make money when a stock price falls. They said that they had flown a drone over the facility that showed that the plant was far from being able to make much new plastic.

PureCycle, based in Orlando, Florida, said it remained on track. “We’re ramping up production,” its chief executive, Dustin Olson, said during a recent tour of the plant, a constellation of pipes, storage tanks and cooling towers in Ironton, near the Ohio River. “We believe in this technology. We’ve seen it work,” he said. “We’re making leaps and bounds.”

Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and L’Oréal have also expressed confidence in PureCycle. L’Oréal said PureCycle was one of many partners developing a range of recycling technologies. P&G said it hoped to use the recycled plastic for “numerous packaging applications as they scale up production.” Nestlé didn’t respond to requests for comment but has said it is collaborating with PureCycle on “groundbreaking recycling technologies.”

PureCycle’s woes are emblematic of broad trouble faced by a new generation of recycling plants that have struggled to keep up with the growing tide of global plastic production, which scientists say could almost quadruple by midcentury.

Overall, the advanced recycling plants are struggling to make a dent in the roughly 36 million tons of plastic Americans discard each year, which is more than any other country. Even if the 10 remaining chemical-recycling plants in the United States were to operate at full capacity, they would together process some 456,000 tons of plastic waste, according to a recent tally by Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit group that advocates stricter controls on plastics production. That’s perhaps enough to raise the plastic recycling rate – which has languished below 10 per cent for decades – by a single percentage point.

For households, that has meant that much of the plastic they put out for recycling doesn’t get recycled at all, but ends up in landfills. Figuring out which plastics are recyclable and which aren’t has turned into, essentially, a guessing game. That confusion has led to a stream of non-recyclable trash contaminating the recycling process, gumming up the system.

“The industry is trying to say they have a solution,” said Terrence J. Collins, a professor of chemistry and sustainability science at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s a non-solution.”

‘Molecular Washing Machine’

It was a long-awaited day last June at PureCycle’s Ironton facility: The company had just produced its first batch of what it describes as “ultra-pure” recycled polypropylene pellets.

That milestone came several years late and with more than US$350 million in cost overruns. Still, the company appeared to have finally made it. “Nobody else can do this,” Jeff Kramer, the plant manager, told a local news crew.

PureCycle had done it by licensing a game-changing method – developed by Procter & Gamble researchers in the mid-2010s but unproven at scale – that uses solvent to dissolve and purify the plastic to make it new again. “It’s like a molecular washing machine,” Olson said.

There’s a reason Procter & Gamble, Nestlé and L’Oréal, some of the world’s biggest users of plastic, are excited about the technology. Many of their products are made from polypropylene, a plastic that they transform into a plethora of products using dyes and fillers. P&G has said it uses more polypropylene than any other plastic, more than a half-million tons a year.

But those additives make recycling polypropylene more difficult.

The EPA estimates that 2.7 per cent of polypropylene packaging is reprocessed. But PureCycle was promising to take any polypropylene – disposable beer cups, car bumpers, even campaign signs – and remove the colors, odors and contaminants to transform it into new plastic.

Soon after the June milestone, trouble hit.

On Sep 13, PureCycle disclosed that its plant had suffered a power failure the previous month that had halted operations and caused a vital seal to fail. That meant the company would be unable to meet key milestones, it told lenders.

Then in November, Bleecker Street Research – a New York-based short-seller, an investment strategy that involves betting that a company’s stock price will fall – published a report asserting that the white pellets that had rolled off PureCycle’s line in June weren’t recycled from plastic waste. The short-sellers instead claimed instead that the company had simply run virgin polypropylene through the system as part of a demonstration run.

Olson said PureCycle hadn’t used consumer waste in the June 2023 run, but it hadn’t used virgin plastic, either. Instead it had used scrap known as “post industrial,” which is what’s left over from the manufacturing process and would otherwise go to a landfill, he said.

Bleecker Street also said it had flown heat-sensing drones over the facility and said it found few signs of commercial-scale activity. The firm also raised questions about the solvent PureCycle was using to break down the plastic, calling it “a nightmare concoction” that was difficult to manage.

PureCycle is now being sued by other investors who accuse the company of making false statements and misleading investors about its setbacks.

Olson declined to describe the solvent. Regulatory filings reviewed by The New York Times indicate that it is butane, a highly flammable gas, stored under pressure. The company’s filing described the risks of explosion, citing a “worst-case scenario” that could cause second-degree burns a half-mile away, and said that to mitigate the risk the plant was equipped with sprinklers, gas detectors and alarms.

Touring the Plant

Olson recently strolled through a cavernous warehouse at PureCycle’s Ironton site, built at a former Dow Chemical plant. Since January, he said, PureCycle has been processing mainly consumer plastic waste and has produced about 1.3 million pounds of recycled polypropylene, or about 1 per cent of its annual production target.

“This is a bag that would hold dog food,” he said, pointing to a bale of woven plastic bags. “And these are fruit carts that you’d see in street markets. We can recycle all of that, which is pretty cool.”

The plant was dealing with a faulty valve discovered the day before, so no pellets were rolling off the line. Olson pulled out a cellphone to show a photo of a valve with a dark line ringing its interior. “It’s not supposed to look like that,” he said.

The company later sent video of Olson next to white pellets once again streaming out of its production line. NYT