There’s a technical term for this whole system: reverse logistics. For the first 100 years of the plastics revolution, companies were basically spraying products at customers – it was a one-way movement of atoms. To successfully recycle you need to do this process in reverse, which requires a whole new set of skills. How do you recover products? What new economics, technologies and policies are needed?
And what about social engineering? Customers might decide: Hey, Who cares about 20 cents?and throw their bottles in the trash. So Infinitum runs encouraging and humorous ads. One shows a tennis player in a locker room throwing a bottle in the trash. A voiceover points out that making a new one requires as much energy as running a ball machine for over an hour. Suddenly, balls are being thrown at him as he runs and ducks for cover.
Overall, the strategy has worked. In Norway, consumers are so environmentally conscious that they have started actively choosing to buy drinks made from recycled bottles. Even though recycled PET costs 1.5 to 1.75 times more than virgin plastic, bottle manufacturers buy and use it.
I wondered: Would it be possible to turn plastic bottles into a… completely A closed loop? Imagine if every country did the same as Norway: a politically mind-blowing “yes,” of course, but let’s go with that. Could bottle manufacturers keep reusing those plastic molecules over and over again and never need virgin plastic?
Not quite. When PET molecules are repeatedly recycled, they begin to “yellow and darken,” said Michael Joyes, director of sustainability at Petainer, a European bottle maker. Over time, they turn black. The material can be lightened with “anti-yellowing” chemicals or blended with virgin materials. Or these older plastics can be used to bottle beverages like Coca-Cola. “The inside is also dark, so people don’t mind that as much,” Joyes said.
Still, repeatedly recycled PET becomes less useful over time. The plastic’s polymer chains shorten. Some clever chemical tricks can lengthen them, and some recyclers predict recycled PET can be used up to eight times. EU legislation requires 30 percent of PET to be recycled into bottles by 2030, and Joyes predicts some countries and brands will push for a much higher figure, up to 70 or even 100 percent recycled PET.
I was impressed by Infinitum’s success, but PET bottles are, chemically and structurally, the easiest plastic to recycle. want reborn (until they do). Many other ways are more tricky. Think of food packaging: it can be made up of several plastics with different recycling processes. Expensive! Recyclers are experimenting with “chemical” recycling, where several different plastics are thrown into a container and the different molecules are separated like the layers of a salad dressing. However, so far, chemical recycling is very energy intensive. The plastic would be recycled, of course, but it would cost a lot and emit mountains of CO2.2exchanging one environmental problem for another.
Maldum is more optimistic. He thinks Infinitum’s strategy for PET recycling could work with all plastics. The trick is to redesign the packaging so that virtually anything can be tossed into a reverse vending machine. “Why do you need to use a tray for meat? You can use a tube,” he said. It was an intriguing idea, but I couldn’t imagine the chaos of food wrappers somehow reconfigured for a vending machine. Would people be so willing to bring empty tubes of raw meat waste to the supermarket to put into a machine?
Moreover, recycling of any kind has its own staunch critics. Some American environmental groups consider plastic recycling to be a blatant form of greenwashing. They doubt that recycling rates will ever rise above the low single digits in the United States and outside Europe, because most politicians will not enact serious penalties and the quality of recycled plastics will be too low. And since plastic could be a huge market for oil companies in the future, those corporations are likely to fight hard to keep society hooked on it.
