by MAURA KELLER
It’s been over a year since China initiated a ban on recycled plastics – leading to a global shift in how plastics are being processed in both the U.S. and other countries. Since the Chinese ban began, China’s plastic imports have plummeted 99 percent.
Frank Killoran, director of circular solutions at Rubicon Global said the temporary plastics ban from China has two impacts from Rubicon’s point of view. First, it’s a transition point. The U.S. is still a major exporter of recycled commodities, just no longer to China.
“In 2018, the U.S. exported seven percent more recycled commodities than in 2017. It went to new buyers in Turkey, Iceland and Africa,” Killoran said.
Second, it has taught the U.S. sellers how important quality is to the buyers of recycled commodities. “Buyers know when they are receiving contaminated commodities, and they won’t accept that any longer,” Killoran said.
Matthew Hollis, co-founder and president of Elytus, a Columbus, Ohio-based waste management technology services company said prior to the ban, China was one of the largest buyers of recyclables for the past two and a half decades. In 2016, 760 million tons of U.S. plastic scrap went to China.
“That figure plummeted by 95 percent last year after China increased its standards for the recycling materials it would accept,” Hollis said. At the start of 2018, the country closed its doors to almost all foreign plastic waste due to the high levels of contamination.
“Without China’s presence in the global market, prices for these materials are plummeting, making it difficult to find enough value to process these recyclables responsibly,” Hollis said.
Some other key challenges coming from the temporary ban by China, include building new domestic markets, working to improve chemical recycling technology so that commercial scale plants are economically efficient, and building new relationships with international commodity buyers outside of China.
Indirectly, Hollis said the Chinese ban has brought additional attention to the U.S. consumption of single-use plastics, fueling a further negative view of those materials. Many cities, states and companies have banned single-use plastic items altogether, impacting manu- facturing and sales.
“The U.S. has been forced to either substantially reduce the amount of contamination in our recyclable materials or handle our recycling stateside,” Hollis said. Many recycling commodity processors are dealing with surplus materials that no longer have the value they once did. Across the U.S., local governments and recycling processors are scrambling to find new markets, resulting in some communities ending their recycling programs entirely.
Positive Outcomes
The industry, as a whole, is re-evaluating the practice of sending all of this material overseas. As Hollis explained, the ban encourages positive change as industry leaders look for real solutions for post-consumer plastics.
“Instead of landfilling the material, the industry is striving to create a valuable product that offsets the use of virgin resources,” Hollis said. Experts say that the recycling crisis may result in innovative solutions for waste management, whether that is expanding stateside processing capacities or urging manufacturers to make their products more easily recyclable. “The China ban has necessitated a discussion that will hopefully make us all better,” Hollis said.
According to Laurie Johnson, chief operating officer of 5280 Recycling Solutions, manufacturers are moving towards using plastics that have the most value in terms of being recycled. “We also see many product manufacturers look to other solutions such as compostable plastics as a substitute for traditional plastic packaging,” Johnson said. “The ban is stimulating innovation in the U.S. and the creation of new market opportunities. It is also causing the market to scrutiny the amount of material generated as waste and ways in which we can begin to reduce that waste from plastic and move more toward reusable items.”
Killoran said that post-consumer recycled plastic producers in the U.S. are working with municipalities to push for new market development programs. For example, one state in the South is considering a bill to use the funds collected by the state from landfill disposal fees, as a fund to help develop domestic markets for recycled commodities. “Challenges in recycling will always bring out creative solutions,” Killoran said.
Joshua Pearce, Richard Witte Endowed Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Michigan Tech, said that China’s refusal to buy plastic from the U.S. was the result of China being tired of cleaning up the U.S.’s contaminated trash.
“The U.S. recycling industry has to shift – we need to start taking care of our own recycling waste rather than having the Chinese do it for us,” Pearce said. “This means ramping up conventional recycling as well as encouraging distributed recycling. These are valuable materials that we are literally wasting when we landfill or burn them instead of turning them back into products. This inefficiency makes us less competitive with other nations that have their recycling act together.”
Recent technical developments in the areas of “distributed recycling” and “distributed manufacturing” provide enormous incentives for people to recycle their own waste to make high-value products for themselves. This is because waste plastic can be turned into such things as high-value 3D printing filament with a recyclebot, which can be turned into even higher value products. Pearce and his team at Michigan Tech have been working with an American industrial 3D printer manufacturer regarding direct 3D printing from waste.
“There is a lot of potential from this approach and such fused particle systems have barely begun to be commercialized, so there is a lot of room for growth,” Pearce said.
As an example, one of Pearce’s students turned a bunch of shredded plastic directly into a skateboard deck for his electric skateboard.
“This saved him a ton of money and got him a product that was customized for his interests. I think as these technologies become more popular recycling will be something you do for yourself. 3D printing is already taking off and the distributed recycling technology is right behind it,” Pearce said. “Everyday people will have a direct economic incentive to recycle rather than simply rely on good will to protect the environment.”
On the Horizon
With a large amount of recyclable materials staying stateside, the Chinese ban has caused a shift in value for recyclable commodities, which makes it hard for processors and haulers to continue spending the time, energy and resources to separate and recycle these materials. “This causes challenges as they attempt to find a better alternative than the landfill for this material,” Hollis said.
Pearce is cautiously optimistic that the Chinese ban could drive a revolution in consumer knowledge about the plastic products we use every day in the U.S. “For example, no one knows much about the plastic in their food packages, let alone what colorants or additives are in them,” Pearce said. “Would you pay a penny more for juice at the grocery store for your kids if you knew that the plastic container was made out of a safe plastic with no carcinogens, mutagens or teratogens? I think most people would.”
What’s more, Pearce said there are enormous economic opportunities for companies to provide the material ingredients for their products. Using existing technology and a modest amount of effort, the complete material ingredients list could be made available for all consumers to make better-informed decisions on their purchases. “Such information accessibility would create new business opportunities for upselling products manufactured with superior materials, improve consumer safety, and enable consumers to remain consistent with their values,” Pearce said. “And it would foster advanced industrial recycling as well as distributed recycling.”
Ultimately, Hollis believes that the U.S. will eventually find a sustainable system to process and use this material in a new way. “We may also work with other countries to create an industry for the use of this material,” Hollis said. “Because the driving force behind China’s recycling ban was the contamination level of the recyclables, researchers are focused on finding new ways to make single stream recycling more efficient and cost-effective. If the U.S. can find a way to create an extremely clean recyclables stream, China may even come back to the table to purchase it in the future.”
According to Johnson, China and other countries will most likely continue to purchase processed plastic that is ready for manufacturing but doubtfully will ever take recycled material again that has not been processed. “The future should hold a lot of great innovation as cities across the U.S. start working on the circular economy approach,” Johnson said. “This means keeping the materials in a closed loop for both economic and environmental benefit.”
Published in the June 2019 Edition
