There’s a technical term for this whole system: reverse logistics. For the first 100 years of the plastics revolution, companies essentially sprayed products at customers—a one-way flow of atoms. Effective recycling requires doing the process in reverse, a whole up-to-date set of skills. How do you get things back? What up-to-date economics, technologies, and policies do you need?
And what social engineering? Customers can decide, Oh, who cares about 20 centsand throw the bottles away. So Infinitum is running some humorously encouraging ads. One shows a tennis player in the locker room throwing a bottle into the trash. The voiceover notes that making a up-to-date one takes as much energy as running a ball machine for an hour or more. Suddenly, he’s pelted with balls as he runs and ducks for cover.
Overall, the strategy worked. In Norway, consumers are now so environmentally conscious that they have started to actively choose drinks from recycled bottles. Even though recycled PET costs 1.5 to 1.75 times more than virgin plastic, bottle manufacturers buy it and operate it.
I was wondering: Would it be possible to recycle plastic bottles into entirely closed loop? Imagine if every country pulled Norway — a politically hallucinogenic “if,” sure, but let’s go there. Could bottle makers keep using those plastic particles over and over again and never need virgin plastic?
Not quite. When PET molecules are recycled over and over, they start to “yellow and darken,” said Michael Joyes, director of sustainability at Petainer, a European bottle maker. Eventually, they turn black. They can be lightened with “anti-yellowing” chemicals or blended with virgin materials. Or, you can operate the older plastics to bottle drinks like Coca-Cola. “The inside is dark, too, so people don’t mind that,” Joyes said.
Still, PET that is recycled many times becomes less useful over time. The polymer chains in the plastic get shorter. Clever chemical tricks can extend them, and some recyclers predict that recycled PET can be used up to eight times. EU regulations mandate that 30 percent of PET in bottles be recycled by 2030—and Joyes predicts that some countries and brands will aim for much higher levels, up to 70 percent or even 100 percent recycled PET.
I was impressed by the success of Infinitum. But PET bottles are, chemically and structurally, the easiest plastic to recycle. Basically to want reborn (until they don’t). Many other forms are more aggressive. Consider food containers: They can be made up of several plastics that have been through different recycling processes. Costly! Recyclers are experimenting with “chemical” recycling, where lots of different plastics are thrown into a vats and the different molecules separate like the layers in a salad dressing. So far, though, chemical recycling is energy-intensive. The plastic would be recycled, yes, but it would cost a lot and emit mountains of CO2trading one environmental problem for another.
Maldum is more optimistic. He thinks Infinitum’s PET recycling strategy could work for all plastics. The trick is to redesign the packaging so that almost anything can be put into a reverse vending machine. “Why use a meat tray? You can use a tube,” he said. It was an intriguing idea, but I couldn’t imagine a wild jungle of food packaging that had somehow been reconfigured for a vending machine. Would people be as willing to carry empty tubes of leftover raw meat to the grocery store to put in the vending machine?
What’s more, recycling in any form has its fierce critics. Some American environmental groups see plastic recycling as a blatant form of greenwashing. They doubt that recycling rates will ever rise beyond the low numbers in the U.S. and outside Europe—because most politicians won’t introduce grave penalties, and the quality of recycled plastic is too low. And because plastic could be a gigantic market for oil companies in the future, those corporations will likely fight to keep society addicted to it.