Circularity
The reverse value chain of plastics
“How many pairs of shoes do you think Singaporeans buy every year?” – the question Paul Fong, the country director of chemical multinational Dow, asked during our conversation about Singapore’s waste problem. “For a small population of only 5.5 million people, a whopping 22 million pairs of shoes are sold every year. The majority of these end up incinerated as waste,” he elucidated.
Dow has created the first shoe recycling permanent ecosystem. By April this year, Dow had recycled 47 metric tons (t) of used shoes, enough to build 7.5 km of running track using recycled plastics.
According to the National Environmental Agency (NEA), out of the 982,000 t of plastic waste generated in 2021 in Singapore, 6% was recycled. Only textile waste did worse, with a recycling rate of 4%. The poor management of plastic waste has given plastics a bad name, said Vimala Arumugam, managing director and head of the Malaysia-Singapore area at BASF. BASF, together with other global companies like Chevron, Dow, Mitsubishi Chemical, ExxonMobil, and Shell, have founded the “The Alliance to End Plastic Waste” (AEPW), an NGO based in Singapore that includes a total of 70 member companies across the plastics value chain. Despite the high level of advocacy coming from plastics producers, 94% of plastics end up in a landfill. Why?
“An important pillar of Vision 2030 is to bolster Circular Economy (CE) initiatives. All of our businesses will be designed with a CE-oriented view, and we will roll out CE-compatible products by transitioning to low-carbon materials and fuels. Change is the only constant in business, and sustainability will be the main driver of change for the years to come.”
Takayuki Inagaki, Managing Director, Mitsui Chemicals Asia Pacific (MCAP)
“Technology-wise, plastic producers have developed the right tools to bring plastic back into their production line, whereas industrial users are equally happy to buy recycled plastics. The challenge remains the downstream of the plastics value chain: waste,” commented Wei Chee Liew, country managing partner at Environmental Resources Management (ERM), a pure-play sustainability consultancy involved with different circularity projects in Southeast Asia.
Plastic waste is the product of two value chains, as the end-of-life product of the virgin plastics industry (the first value chain), and the raw material of recycled plastics (the reverse value chain). The main problem that players in the recycling value chain confront is the lack of available, suitable feedstocks, and this is because plastic is not adequately separated from other types of waste. Once in the landfill, mixed waste becomes incredibly difficult to segregate, and limited plastic can be recovered and recycled. This is why, even though brands are increasingly interested to offer products made of recycled products and consumers are equally taken with the idea, not a lot of plastics begin a new lifecycle.
For the Singaporean population, recycling is less a question of education as it is one of convenience: “An issue specific to Singapore is that more than 90% of the population live in high-rise buildings and throw the rubbish through a chute into a single bin that sits at the ground level,” said Liew.
In addition to the mixed bin, Singapore’s dwellers are provided with a dedicated “blue bin” at the ground level for mixed recycled materials like plastics and glass. Traveling down from the 40th floor to throw away plastics is probably too much to ask of most well-meaning citizens. Cognizant of the inefficiencies of the classic recycling system, Dow, together with multiple partners, introduced the “orange bin,” dedicated solely to collecting used shoes. Today, 200 orange bins can be found around the city.
The chemical industry is investing heavily in recycling and a lot of research is devoted to developing recycling technologies. While most plastic recycled today is obtained via a process of mechanical recycling (using mechanical force and heat), the new frontier is considered to be chemical recycling, which uses a process called pyrolysis to break down polymers to their molecular level and transform them back into a feedstock from which new plastics can be made (repolymerization). This process enables an endless loop, whereas the traditional mechanical route has limitations in terms of maintaining the quality of plastics after the first cycle. By 2023, Singapore will become home to Asia’s largest pyrolysis plant, with a capacity of 50,000 t/y of pyrolysis oil, which has been built by Shell. The unit will be Shell’s first such in the world.
The proprietary knowledge for recycling technologies is becoming a key-differentiating feature in the market. LyondellBasell has patented the MoReTec technology for chemical recycling, while Eastman is the first to have brought molecular recycling to a commercial scale, and it continues to increase scale by commissioning the world’s largest molecular-plastics facility in France, an investment worth US$1 billion. “With 30 years of experience in the processing of methanolysis (depolymerizing or taking polymers to their basic level), 70 years of experience working with PET (polyethylene terephthalate), and 100 years in the chemical industry, we understand sustainability down to the molecular level,” said Gulferaz Ali, VP and managing director, Eastman Asia Pacific.
The trend across most large plastics producers is to gain a foothold in both mechanical and advanced recycling technologies, as well as investing in bio-based plastics, which has become known as organic recycling. For example, Arkema, after working for two years with Agiplast as a recycling technology partner, acquired the Italian specialist in the regeneration of high-performance polymers to become the first fully-integrated high-performance polymer manufacturer with an offer of both recycled and bio-based materials.
With a full range of technologies available, chemical players can bring to the market a complete circular portfolio. SABIC’s TruCircle portfolio includes chemically and mechanically processed products, as well as bio-based products. Similarly, LyondellBasell is commercializing three product lines under its Circulen brand: CirculenRecover (mechanically recycled polymers); CirculenRevive (chemically recycled polymers); and CirculenRenew (renewable-based polymers). Commenting on the importance of this three-legged approach, Allen Yu, VP for LyondellBasell Asia Pacific, said: “This breadth of approach is what sets the path forward for a long-term circularity journey that saves plastic waste from ending up in landfills and productively inserts it back into the economy.”
Globally, only about 2 million t/y of 100% biopolymers are produced globally (versus 380 million t/y of total plastic production), as reported in the Nature Reviews Materials journal. Bio-plastics have a lower carbon footprint and are easier to recycle than fossil fuels plastics, but the costs associated with the production are higher. “Biopolymers follow a different price mechanism compared to simple fossil fuel commodities, and the market needs to arrive at the maturity to understand these differences,” said Roger Marchioni, Asia director for chemicals and polymers at Braskem.
Within its “I’m Green” portfolio, Braskem launched the first renewable PE wax bio-based ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), an elastomer polymer used in the footwear industry.
Singapore’s rapid development over the past four decades has come with a seven-fold increase in waste. At this pace, Singapore’s only landfill, Semakau, will run out of space by 2035. Within the Zero Waste Masterplan designed by the government in 2019, Singapore aims to reduce the waste sent to Semakau by 30% by 2030 and increase the overall recycling rate to 70% by the same year.
CONCLUDING THOUGHT
“I see plenty of opportunity in the transition from a linear to a circular economy, especially in Singapore, where the call to turn waste into treasure is strong, but none of these goals can be achieved on our own, so we need like-minded partners to innovate, to invest, and use our suite of solutions to work towards a sustainable future for our planet.”
Paul Fong, Country Director, Dow