Alliance to End Plastic Waste & BCG: Mechanical Recycling

Plastic is everywhere – not just in packaging and products, but in oceans, rivers and landfills. 

Studies have shown that microplastics are now even inside human bodies. 

Recycling is a great solution, but has a complex value chain to manage and many challenges still stand in the way of circularity for plastics. 

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste hopes to achieve its name and end plastic waste entering the environment.

Martyn Tickner is Chief Advisor of Circular Solutions at the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, working to develop understanding of feasible solutions to improve waste management. 

Arun Rajamani is Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), based in Singapore. 

Arun leads BCG’s chemicals work in Asia Pacific and works extensively on projects related to recycling and the circular economy, including the Alliance’s Solution Model Playbook titled Capturing Value Through Basic Mechanical Recycling of Plastic Waste.

Martyn and Arun share their expertise with Sustainability Magazine.

Why is it important to segregate waste at its source? 

Martyn:

Recycling for use in high value applications requires a good and consistent quality of plastic feedstock. This is best achieved through avoiding mixing different types of waste, or segregating waste before collection - for example PET beverage bottles, HDPE milk and juice jugs - which can be used in closed-loop schemes where packaging and products are returned directly to the producer. 

Even keeping plastic packaging films separated from paper, or returning (semi-) rigid packaging partly washed and separated from glass and batteries, significantly reduces the cost of sorting and improves the quality of the feedstock for recycling. This greatly improves the economics and supports higher recycling rates. 

How can waste management and recycling drive a circular economy for plastics? 

Martyn:

A circular economy of plastics will require many different solutions to be applied, ranging from reduction - avoiding unnecessary use - and reuse and refill solutions, through mixed waste and segregated collection, to deployment of different sorting and recycling technologies. Recycling is an integral piece of the solution to address plastic waste in the environment. 

Design is important – we have spent decades developing advanced solutions to maximise performance of packaging, protecting the contents, dramatically extending food shelf life, ensuring optimal consumer experience at the lowest cost. The consequent complexity of packaging types and the use of multi-material solutions, pigments, adhesives etc. has however exacerbated the complexity and cost of subsequent recycling. Driving the design of solutions to be optimal for the full life cycle pre- and post-use is a critical enabler for a circular economy and an important reason for implementing Extended Producer Responsibility schemes consistent with the maturity of a country’s waste management system.    

The implementation of such a suite of solutions needs to be supported by appropriate waste management regulations, policies, targets and financial interventions which drive adoption of the most beneficial solutions. These constitute a journey which starts with basic collection of all waste streams, not just plastic, and then progresses to increasingly advanced solutions such as might be found in countries like Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Norway and South Korea.

Arun:

A circular economy aims to minimise post-consumer plastic waste by preventing leakage from incineration and landfill disposal, while reintegrating it into the system through closed-loop pathways like enhanced recycling and reuse and open-loop paths to beneficially substitute the use of plastic or other raw materials in different applications.  

A strong plastic waste management infrastructure is essential to accomplish this—one that effectively collects clean, high-quality waste, making recycling both economically and technically viable. This allows cleaner plastic waste to be reintroduced as products with similar properties (e.g., recycled bottles and jugs) or, if contaminated, downcycled into second-life products (e.g., carpets, benches, etc.).

However, a significant gap exists between plastic waste and the infrastructure for its collection and processing, primarily due to unclear responsibilities and a lack of incentives among stakeholders. Government regulations like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) in several parts of the world are expected to drive change by providing financial motivation to strengthen infrastructure, meet recycling targets and advance circularity.

What are the Alliance's Solution Models?

Martyn:

The Alliance’s Solution Models involve the development, de-risking and demonstration of solutions to address different sources of plastic waste in different situations. 

Each solution is tested through the Alliance’s on-ground projects. As the projects and solutions mature, the Alliance combines these findings with existing industry experience to develop Solution Models, which the Alliance hopes will be replicated and scaled by other like-minded organisations. 

The Alliance has been documenting these solution models alongside already industry proven solutions in a series of publicly available playbooks in order to share our knowledge with a variety of organisations across the plastics ecosystem and accelerate the transition to a circular economy for plastics. These solution models represent individual components of what eventually becomes a system solution – meaning a system that provides a holistic and circular solution for different plastic waste streams, with maximum economic and environmental benefit.

The latest playbook, ‘Capturing Value Through Basic Mechanical Recycling of Mixed Plastic Waste’, highlights how basic mechanical recycling can capture value from mixed plastic waste with simple technologies that convert waste into products such as furniture, basic construction materials and other eco-aggregate materials. This enables kick-starting a focus on recycling in countries at an early stage of waste management maturity.

What are the main barriers to achieving a global circular economy for plastics? 

Martyn:

Many emerging and developing economies still lack basic waste collection infrastructure, which allows plastic waste to leak into the environment rather than being valorised and kept in circulation. 

For more developed countries, there remains a lack of impactful economic incentives which translates to slower innovation and adoption of advanced sortation and recycling technologies such as digital watermarking on plastic packaging and using AI object recognition for automated sorting.  

From a macro perspective, there is insufficient funding for waste management systems, with an estimated US$2.1tn needed by 2040 to eliminate plastic leakage into the environment. Countries across the globe are hindered by chronic underinvestment in waste management infrastructure, particularly collection infrastructure; waste management collection needs to be a service to the community but often represents a significant cost to implement and operate and is therefore the most underfunded aspect of waste management. Systems change is needed if the world is to address this funding gap.

Arun:

Several economic, technical and regulatory barriers limit the scalability of plastic circularity. These include:

• Lack of awareness in consumers resulting in low participation in waste segregation at the source, reducing the quality and efficiency of recycling.
• Insufficient waste collection and recycling infrastructure, leaving much of the global population without proper disposal options, with plastic waste often ending up in landfills, waterways or being openly burned.
• High costs of collection, sorting and processing, due to widely dispersed waste from diverse sources. The mix of different polymer types, additives and contamination levels further drives up costs.
• High contamination of post-consumer waste, which requires advanced technology that is not always accessible. The wide variety of plastic types and additives complicates recycling, reducing the quality of recycled materials.
• Weak regulation and policy enforcement, leading to illegal dumping and burning of plastic waste.

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