Is this ancient process the future of plastics recycling?

This is the first episode in a new partnership between ProPublica and On Point.

On Point and ProPublica are launching a new collaboration, bringing you monthly special episodes that combine ProPublica’s groundbreaking investigative reporting with On Point’s incisive analysis.

In the first episode: The world is awash in plastic waste. Oil companies claim to have a solution, an advanced form of chemical recycling. But can it deliver on its promise?

Lisa Song, reporter at ProPublica, covering the environment, energy and climate change. Author of the ProPublica article “The ‘delusion’ of advanced plastic recycling."

Anthony Schiavo, senior director and principal analyst at Lux Research, based in Boston. Host of Lux Research's “Innovation Matters Podcast."

George Huber, professor of chemical engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Center for Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics.

Jason DesVeaux, researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Bethanie Carney Almroth, professor in the department of biological & environmental sciences at the University of Gothenburg.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is a special episode of On Point, I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. ProPublica's independent, non-profit newsroom is one of the most respected and award-winning journalism organizations in the country. It's won seven Pulitzer Prizes, among other honors. We here at On Point don't do so badly ourselves. We've won the National Edward R. Murrow Award and Gracie Awards for Women in Journalism, among other honors.

So I'm proud to announce that our two teams are launching a new collaboration. Just about once a month, we'll bring you a special episode that combines ProPublica's groundbreaking investigative reporting with On Point's incisive analysis.

The collaboration will bring you new reporting from across the country on issues that are changing the way we all live. And today, it's our inaugural episode.

Human beings are ingenious. For thousands of years, we've used a process known as pyrolysis. The word is derived from the beautifully evocative ancient Greek pyre, for fire or fever. And lysis for separation or loosening. You can call it the freeing fire. Because that's what pyrolysis does. You apply a very high heat, under controlled conditions, to organic substances, and you liberate separated products, volatile compounds and some solid residues.

It's how charcoal's been made since ancient times. There's also evidence that ancient Egyptians used pyrolytic compounds to embalm some of their dead royalty. It's now used across industry for everything from biomass conversion to transforming scrap rubber tires. So an elegant idea, right? You take old organics and make them into something new.

So what better way to apply that idea than to one of the most ubiquitous, hydrocarbon products in the world? Plastics.

Made from natural gas, crude oil, and other compounds, plastics are everywhere. In almost every society on earth, household items, industrial tools, medical equipment, food containers, modern civilization cannot function without plastics. And we generate approximately 430 million metric tons of it every year.

And as a result, plastic waste is also everywhere.

(MONTAGE)

NPR: Every year, almost 10 million tons of plastic goes into the ocean. That's like having a full garbage truck unloading its waste into the water every minute for an entire year.

CNN: Lush vegetation flanks this peaceful South African river, but a bird's eye view reveals a grim detail. Plastic waste.

CBS: Scientists from the Netherlands and the UK recently identified microplastics in two areas of the human body where they have never been seen before, deep in the lungs of some surgical patients and in the blood of anonymous donors.

CHAKRABARTI: Traditional recycling was supposed to be the solution to this plastic waste catastrophe.

But in the U.S., fewer than 10% of plastics are actually recycled annually. In the meantime, the World Economic Forum expects plastics production to double in the next 20 years. Petrochemicals, which include plastics, are expected to drive half of the demand growth for oil by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency.

In the U.S. alone, companies have invested more than $200 billion since 2010 in new plastics and chemicals projects, according to the American Chemistry Council, an industry group, all of which means plastics are big business. And now, Big Oil claims to have a solution to the big problem of plastic waste.

So put it another way. What do Egyptian mummies and Exxon Mobil have in common? Pyrolysis.

EXXON: Through advanced recycling, we can provide customers with certified circular plastics. These certified circular plastics have the same quality and performance as our existing products, with no contamination or degradation. This allows our customers to use certified circular plastics in all of the same applications as normal, without requalification, from high performance food packaging and greenhouse films to medical equipment and personal hygiene products.

CHAKRABARTI: That's from a 2023 video from Exxon Mobil describing how pyrolysis can ideally produce what they call circular plastics.

And the goal one day is almost 100% circularity. But according to reporting from ProPublica reporter Lisa Song, plastic pyrolysis is promising much, much more than it can actually deliver. And Lisa joins us now to tell us all about it. Lisa, welcome to On Point.

LISA SONG: Hi, thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: And thank you for being our first reporter in this inaugural collaboration between On Point and ProPublica.

I loved that in your story you became obsessed with this issue of pyrolysis through a plastic cup. Can you tell me about that?

SONG: Yeah, so when I started reporting on pyrolysis, I was really curious about what were the items actually being made through pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is the most popular kind of chemical recycling happening today.

And chemical recycling is the term used for a whole list of different technologies used to try and recycle plastic. And I had seen this press release about a fruit cup, like a little disposable cup that holds a little bit of fruit. You can bring it in your lunchbox. It's like a snack fruit cup type thing.

And the press release talked about how the cup itself was made through pyrolysis. It had been made through a collaboration between ExxonMobil and two other companies. But when I emailed them to ask, where can I buy this cup? Can I get it at my local grocery store? I wasn't getting any answers. And so that got me really curious and inspired me to look more deeply into how pyrolysis works.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so then describe it to us. I know it's a complex chemical process, but for plastics, or at least in this sort of modern-day version of plastics pyrolysis, what is it supposed to do? How does it work?

SONG: So pyrolysis is supposed to take regular, plastic waste, especially things like food packaging, flexible food packaging.

And then through the pyrolysis process, you heat it up in special conditions. And then you create a whole bunch of chemicals from that. Then you take some of those chemicals and you put it through another process. And out of that, you're supposed to be able to create the building blocks of raw plastic.

So then you can eventually make brand new plastic products that you can use to make food packaging and therefore recycled yogurt cups, and butter containers and all sorts of things that you would find at the grocery store. That is the sort of very clean promise of pyrolysis.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so really the major difference is that it's a chemical process rather than the mechanical recycling that we're more familiar with.

SONG: Yeah. So in regular mechanical recycling, there's a lot of types of plastics that you can't really recycle through mechanical recycling. And that includes things like plastic bags, all kinds of flexible food packaging. And pyrolysis is supposed to be able to handle that kind of plastic trash, so that instead of throwing it away, you're recycling it into new food packaging and new useful plastic products.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, okay. So that's important. Because actually, I think people can imagine looking into their own recycle bins versus their garbage cans. There's just a ton of plastic stuff that we still have to throw away. Pyrolysis is supposed to solve that. Okay. Hold on to that thought here for a second, Lisa, because let's go back to mechanical recycling.

From your reporting, I learned that, what, 50% to 80% of mechanical recycling actually does get recycled into new plastic? That's a wide range, but also not a terrible one.

SONG: Yeah. The idea of mechanical recycling is if you start with a hundred pounds of stuff that you can recycle mechanically, then more than half of that is going to end up in the final products you make.

And those products can be things like a recycled plastic used for a water bottle, or a carpet or a park bench or something. And that's the overall efficiency of mechanical recycling.

CHAKRABARTI: And then in comparison, how efficient is pyrolysis?

SONG: You're looking at something that's much less efficient.

So if you started off with a hundred pounds of plastic trash that you feed into the pyrolysis process, by the time you get to the very end and get the useful plastic at the end, you're looking at maybe 15% to 20% of that ends up as new plastic. So half, maximum half of what we get out of mechanical recycling.

SONG: Yes. Yes. It's just a lot less efficient.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay a little bit later in the show, I want to talk to you about the other products that come out of pyrolysis. Because I think that's an interesting and important part of the story. But in terms of the idea that here's a way that we cannot just reconstitute, but literally recycle and reuse plastics, if the efficiency rate for plastics recycling with pyrolysis is so low, why is it that, we played that bit of tape from ExxonMobil from their 2023 video, they're calling it circular.

SONG: Yeah, I think if you're focused on the plastic that you get out at the end, that they would call that circular. Because instead of burning all of that plastic waste in an incinerator, we're putting it in a landfill. The idea is that you're getting some of it at least out as new plastic at the end.

Circular is this keyword or buzzword that the plastics industry is using a lot lately, and they're using that to talk about all kinds of recycling. And a little bit of reuse as well. It is a confusing word, because nobody agrees on exactly what circular means, but it is used as a sustainability term.

Okay. There's no agreement yet. And you also show in your story that in terms of the plastic that comes out, the reusable plastic that comes out of the pyrolysis process, a lot of it can't actually, help me understand this, a lot of it can't actually be reused in new plastic products.

SONG: Yeah. The way it works is once you make a new plastic product out of pyrolysis, the physical item you have only contains a few percent recycled plastic, at most. It's just not possible, based on how it works, to make a new cup, for example, that's 50% recycled content. You're looking at maybe 5% or 2% recycled content. And so that is a marketing problem that the industry needs to solve, and they have found an interesting solution to that.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that solution is what we want to talk about when we come back from this quick break.

You're listening to Lisa Song. She's a reporter at ProPublica who covers the environment, energy, and climate change. And her story, “The ‘delusion’ of advanced plastic recycling," is the focus of our first collaborative radio effort between On Point and ProPublica, and we'll have a lot more when we come back.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: You're back with a special episode of On Point. This is our inaugural episode of our collaboration with ProPublica. And today Lisa Song joins us. She's a reporter for ProPublica who covers the environment, energy, and climate change. And we're digging into her article titled “The ‘delusion’ of advanced plastic recycling." And why Big Oil is talking about pyrolysis as a potential solution for the ubiquitous problem of plastic waste worldwide.

Now, Lisa, before the break, you had given us this detailed explanation of how pyrolysis works, and just how much reusable plastic or recyclable material comes out of the pyrolysis process, which doesn't seem as efficient as traditional mechanical recycling. But you had hinted that oil companies are finding a PR way around this.

So tell me more.

SONG: Yeah. So this gets into a complicated issue called mass balance. And the way it works is when you have pyrolysis, and you break down plastic, and you make a new plastic product at the end. At the end of the day, you can't make a new recycled product that has more than about 10% recycled content in it.

So you end up making these plastic food containers, yogurt tubs, for example, that are only going to have maybe 2% or 5% recycled content in it. And that creates a PR problem, because consumers are interested in buying green products. But if you're trying to sell them something that only has a few percent recycled plastic in it, it doesn't look very impressive.

And so the industry has started using this accounting method called mass balance, which allows them to market plastic products as containing 20% or 30% recycled plastic, even if the actual item only contains a few percent recycled plastic. And this accounting method is called mass balance.

And the type of mass balance that the industry is using, allows them to market products as having more recycled content than they physically contain.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. You know what? I, Lisa, usually consider myself pretty good at following numbers on the radio, but I want to be sure I understand this again.

Somehow through, is it a creative accounting method that they can go from 2% recycled material to claiming what, 30% recycled material? What exactly are they balancing here?

SONG: Yeah, you could call it that. It's definitely a creative accounting method. Okay. What essentially happens is that the companies are feeding into the system, let's say a hundred pounds of chemicals that were created through pyrolysis.

So they have a hundred pounds of recycled chemicals. Plastic feedstock, but only some of that becomes new plastic. The rest of it ends up becoming other stuff, like diesel fuel and other chemicals that are not used to make plastic. And so these companies are saying, we want credit for all of the recycled feedstock we put into the system.

And we want to be able to allocate all of that recycled stuff towards the end product that will make us the most money. And in this case, it is the recycled plastic products. They're basically allocating all of the recycled stuff they fed in towards the recycled yogurt tubs they're making. And based on that, they are able to say these yogurt tubs contain 20% recycled content or 30%, even if in reality, they only physically contain 2% or 5% recycled content.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So basically, the claim is everything, we want to count everything that we put in as potentially recyclable products.

SONG: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Even though some of it doesn't end up as recyclable plastic and therefore the output number is higher than what the actual percentage of recyclable plastic is.

Okay. That was a really good explanation, and I appreciate that because it leads me to another really important question. Lisa, that there's what, could potentially be 80% to 85% of the materials created through plastic pyrolysis, while not plastic in and of themselves. You mentioned, it's things like diesel fuel, which that seems like a pretty important material to be able to generate through a chemical recycling process. Because I presume that diesel fuel is usable.

SONG: Yeah, you can use it the same way you would use regular diesel fuel made from oil and gas.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let's hang on to that thought for a second. Because I want to introduce another guest into the conversation. Now, he's Anthony Schiavo, and he is the Senior Director and Principal Analyst at Lux Research based in Boston, Massachusetts, and they're a global advisory group.

They provide research and market insights on emerging sustainability technologies. Anthony, welcome to On Point.

ANTHONY SCHIAVO: Thanks so much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: We'll come back to this diesel fuel issue in just a second, but I'd like to get your big picture view on where pyrolysis is, in terms of a mature technology that we could turn to for recycling plastic waste.

SCHIAVO: Yeah, so the pyrolysis technology itself is relatively mature. As you mentioned in the intro, people have been using this for biomass and for tires for many years. The challenge is really applying it to the plastic waste ecosystem. We see that there's about 2 million tons of announced capacity for pyrolysis through about 2026.

However, these projects have had a tendency to not get finished on time. And also, they've had a tendency to not produce nearly the amount of process, nearly the amount of plastic waste that they theoretically can. So to give you an example, Brightmark, a company in the United States, built a 100,000 ton per year facility in 2020.

And by 2022, they had only processed around 2,000 tons of waste through that facility. So there's a really big gap between the nameplate capacity and what's actually getting done on the ground. And that's because the challenges of actually sourcing enough waste, and sourcing the right kinds of plastic waste, proved to be a lot more difficult than the people building these plastic pyrolysis facilities initially expected.

CHAKRABARTI: Sourcing the right kind of waste. Can you explain that more? Because my understanding from reading the literature was that part of the promise of pyrolysis is that we could use so many more types of plastics than can currently go through traditional mechanical recycling.

SCHIAVO: Definitely. And that was the promise of plastic pyrolysis.

It was really billed as a solution for mixed waste recycling. However, what these companies quickly found out is that to produce oil that was high enough quality to actually be used to make new plastics, that input waste had to meet pretty specific standards. You really wanted to have a lot of polyethylene and polypropylene waste.

So these are the things we use to make plastic bags, for example. And importantly, you needed to exclude other certain types of waste, like PVC, polyvinyl chloride, and PET, plastic bottles. Actually getting that waste in the right composition, at the right quality, was a lot more challenging than people thought.

You couldn't actually put a lot of different types of mixed plastics in there. And the second challenge was that you mentioned that there's about a 7% to 10% recycling rate globally. That's really concentrated in two types of plastic. PET bottles, so plastic water bottles and HDPE jugs, polyethylene milk cartons.

Everything else is basically not recycled. So that 7% is actually around a third, 33% for those two products, and almost zero for everything else. The waste collection, sorting, and separation ecosystem, globally, was not really set up to provide the kind of waste that the pyrolysis producers wanted to buy, and they were looking to buy it at a very cheap price.

The expectation was they could get it for almost free, because it isn't very useful, normally has to be landfilled or incinerated. But actually, building that ecosystem to supply them the waste is turning out to be a much more challenging and costly endeavor than they initially expected.

CHAKRABARTI: This sounds like the customary set of problems or challenges that any new technology that's creating a new market is going to encounter, right?

Because you're exactly right. People throw away that food packaging, because they've been habituated into thinking they can't recycle it. But if over time, the ability for pyrolysis, the process for pyrolysis to be more widespread, that sort of recycling ecosystem that you were talking about, wouldn't that naturally evolve to be able to provide then the materials that we're currently throwing away?

SCHIAVO: On some level, I think that's true. The waste ecosystem will evolve. However, it's a really big challenge. If you think about the average size of a mechanical recycling facility, that's typically around 10,000 to 25,000 tons per year. One of the challenges with pyrolysis is that it needs to operate at a large scale in order to be cost effective, and also in order to have credible sustainability claims.

So you're really looking at facilities, at least 100,000 tons per year. Up to 200,000, 300,000, 400,000 tons per year. Waste is highly decentralized. It's everywhere. It's in everyone's home. It's in every business. So the more you have to centralize that waste into these large facilities, the more expensive it gets.

There is a market that can develop here, but I also think there's some pretty fundamental mismatches between the current pyrolysis technology and just the nature of waste collection and waste creation.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Lisa, did you want to chime in here with your thoughts on that?

SONG: No, not really. (LAUGHS) I think Anthony did a really good job.

Just in general, that you keep seeing these big press releases from companies on how great they're doing on pyrolysis and what large capacities they have. But the follow through, as you said, isn't always there. And so you really have to look at these announcements and press releases with a healthy dose of skepticism and wait a couple of years to see if what they're proposing actually happens.

CHAKRABARTI: It has a touch of that Silicon Valley, make it, fake it till you make it feel to it. But then sometimes technologies in Silicon Valley do eventually make it. But like you said, we don't know in the interim.

But I want to hear from a different voice here for just a second, because we also spoke with George Huber, who's a professor of chemical engineering at the university of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs the center for chemical upcycling of waste plastics.

Now he studies pyrolysis and sees the technology as a beneficial tool in the fight to reduce plastic waste. That's in part because the process of pyrolysis, according to Huber, can better handle polyolefin plastics. Some of those flimsy, finicky plastics that don't do well in traditional mechanical recycling.

GEORGE HUBER: We're not going to replace polyolefins. Polyolefins include polyethylene and polypropylene. So your plastic bags are polyolefins. Most of your plastic packaging that you buy anything with, that's wrapped around something, that's a polyethylene. You can think about saran wrap. A lot of yogurt containers are polypropylene.

They have a market. They have a use.

CHAKRABARTI: And as Huber sees it, every pound of plastic waste put into pyrolysis, and made into something else, is a pound of plastic that isn't automatically getting incinerated or going straight to the landfill. The benefits is you're not landfilling plastic. So we need to learn how to recycle them better.

And we need to learn how to use these materials in a more sustainable way, so we can make new plastics from them or other chemicals from them.

CHAKRABARTI: If only, he says, the process could be easily scaled up, and that's what we were just talking about a minute ago. But as mentioned, this new technology faces an unusual problem. Because oftentimes, innovations that are the first to market tend to define or even dominate the new market they've created, but with pyrolysis, it's the exact opposite.

HUBER: A lot of announcements with plastic pyrolysis, a lot of plants are being built, some are semi operational, some are having problems, some should have never been built. People have to be willing to put investments to develop the technology. In the chemical engineering field, everybody likes to be second.

Nobody likes to be first, because there's so much risks. It's so expensive to be a pioneer.

CHAKRABARTI: However, Huber does not mean that's a reason to abandon pyrolysis. For as long as human beings are so heavily reliant on plastics, and for as long as we keep producing hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste every year, Huber believes we need to support every new recycling technology that we can develop.

HUBER: Every age is defined by the material that we use. And right now, it's the plastic age, but we don't have a good end of life solution for a lot of plastics. And I think it's very critical that we do. And I think pyrolysis is going to be one step in solving and using and converting some of our plastic materials.

CHAKRABARTI: So that was George Huber, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs the Center for Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics. Anthony, I was wondering if you would respond to what Huber said there.

SCHIAVO: I think he's right in that the chemical industry definitely likes to be second to a lot of things.

But I think one of the big challenges here is that pyrolysis, it really does fit with the chemicals industry modus operandi, which is building large scale, high temperature, very expensive pieces of capital infrastructure. This is a type of process that's very familiar to the chemicals industry in the way that mechanical recycling is not.

So there's a natural tendency to gravitate towards this solution. However, I think that chemical companies are beginning to realize that mechanical recycling is going to be part of the process, and part of the solution going forward. We've seen these companies begin to get involved there.

It's very challenging for them though, because that really does begin to compete with their existing production of chemicals. I'd also say that we really do need to think about reducing the amount of plastic that we use. I agree that we're still going to be using plastics in 50, 100 years, but there are a lot of opportunities to reduce the initial amount of consumption, and that reduces waste all the way through the ecosystem.

You really do need regulation for that, though.

CHAKRABARTI: Lisa, tell me more about what you found in your reporting, because really the beating heart of this issue here is how much the big oil companies and the chemical industry, as Anthony just said, are focusing on marketing pyrolysis. Does this mean that they're not putting as much effort into scaling up or improving other forms of more efficient plastics recycling?

SONG: I'm not sure about that. I think the bigger picture here is people are realizing more and more that we need to solve the plastic problem. And research shows us that the best way to do that is to reduce the amount of new plastic that's being made, that we can't solve this crisis unless reducing plastic production is a part of the solution.

And we have right now more than 100 countries gathering together, trying to hammer out a United Nations global treaty on plastic, and one of the big tension points is this question of, will the treaty force the world to produce less plastic? And we've seen that the plastic and oil and gas companies really don't want to talk about reducing plastic production.

They want to keep the focus and the attention on various types of recycling, whether that's mechanical recycling, or pyrolysis or other types of chemical recycling. And so it's in their business interest to keep talking about recycling rather than turn the conversation to reducing the amount of plastic that's made.

CHAKRABARTI: That's right. As we talked about in the beginning, what half of oil demand growth is going to be, due or predicted to be, due to a rise in plastics production demand. So Lisa Song, who's a reporter with ProPublica, stand by here for just a second, and Anthony Schiavo with Lux Research, hang on for a moment, too.

There's a lot more to talk about regarding pyrolysis and plastics recycling. And then of course, our role, each individual human being on planet Earth in doing what we can to curb the plastic waste problem. So we'll have all that in just a moment. This is On Point.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: This is a special episode of On Point. It's our inaugural episode of a new collaboration we're undertaking with the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-profit independent newsroom, ProPublica. And Lisa Song joins us today. She's a reporter at ProPublica who covers the environment, energy, and climate.

And today we're talking about her article, “The ‘delusion’ of advanced plastic recycling." Or why pyrolysis as a form of plastics recycling is being pushed by Big Oil, and why it may not be all that Big Oil says it's cracked up to be. And by the way, you can find a copy of Lisa's story linked at our website. Anthony Schiavo is also with us. He's senior director and principal analyst at Lux Research, which provides research and market insights on emerging sustainability technology.

Anthony, before we get to the really big questions of all the things we need to do to curb the plastic waste catastrophe that's happening around planet Earth, there's a major part of what's claimed about pyrolysis that I want to dig deeper on.

And that is, as Lisa very insightfully reports, the actual plastics recycling portion of pyrolysis is definitely not as attractive as is being marketed. But we've also mentioned in passing so far that some 80% to 85% of those products created by that heat conversion, they turn into some other products which could actually be potentially useful.

Do you know what some of those other products are?

SCHIAVO: Sure. So when you produce pyrolysis oil. That's really a mix of a bunch of different types of hydrocarbons. You can either use that directly as a fuel, and indeed that's actually quite common in a lot of biomass pyrolysis and other forms of pyrolysis.

They just burn what comes out of that directly. Or you can put that into the existing refinery infrastructure. That's where you'll produce those plastic precursors, things like ethylene and propylene. But you'll also produce gasoline, diesel fuel, and so you can use those just as conventional fuels.

The proponents of this claim that there are carbon emission reduction benefits here, that actually using plastics for pyrolysis is maybe 20% less emissions intensive than, for example, incinerating the plastics pyrolysis. So it's potentially a way of producing a somewhat lower carbon fuel, in addition to providing this new resource for making plastics.

What percent of the inputted plastics into pyrolysis end up as completely unusable, just pure waste product?

SCHIAVO: So about 25% to 35% is essentially burned to power the process. That is a non condensable gas fraction. So that's essentially recirculated and used to put energy back into the process. And then depending on what type of process you're using, you can also create char. So that's that solid mass that maybe would have been used as coal back in the day, right? That depends on the temperature and the process parameters, but you could have anywhere from 0% to maybe 10% char. So you're looking at yields somewhere in the 65% to 75% range for oil.

So about 25% to 35% of the product is essentially not recoverable.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, and then the 60%-ish for those other potentially reusable products like oil, and then what, that leaves us about 10%, as Lisa was saying, in terms of things that actually become new plastics.

SCHIAVO: That 65%, about 10% to 15% of that will probably become plastics, yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So with that in mind, we reached out to Jason DesVeaux, who's a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Lab, which is part of the Department of Energy. Jason and NREL have been studying how various forms of plastics recycling, including pyrolysis, compare from technical, economic, and environmental perspectives.

And his research finds that producing recycled plastic from pyrolysis can be environmentally and economically very taxing, based on where the technology currently stands. But he told us it's also important to remember those other forms of chemical recycling that are in development right now. And they should be considered as a whole, as a part of the broader conversation about plastic waste management.

JASON DESVEAUX: These chemical recycling technologies, I would like to envision them as complementary to mechanical recycling. Because ideally they're suited to the feedstocks that mechanical recycling cannot take. If you have a mixed feedstock that can't be mechanically recycled, that could have other downstream environmental impacts if it were incinerated or landfilled, then pyrolysis could be a strategy for recycling that.

Sort of thinking of Lord of the Rings, there won't be one ring to rule them all. It will be a suite of technologies to arrive at a suitable recycling system.

CHAKRABARTI: And that's why DesVeaux believes that things look a little bit better for pyrolysis when we do think about some of those other products that we mentioned that can be made through the process.

DESVEAUX: What's termed pyrolysis oil, or the product that would be obtained from performing pyrolysis on a mixed plastic feedstock or just a plastic feedstock in general, could then be used and integrated into existing products. Like petrochemical refinery units, and it can go to so many different things, plastics, fuels, anything that is petrochemically derived, it could feasibly integrate into. For example, like the lighter fluid you use in Zippo lighters or gasoline, the economics and the environmental impacts look better when you target a certain range of chemicals.

The process could look competitive with petrochemically derived, but it's not per se a slam dunk to produce again those chemicals through pyrolysis, as opposed to virgin oil. There are a lot of details that matter there. It can look competitive, or it can look worse than deriving it from oil.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Jason DesVeaux, researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. So Lisa, your reporting did catch the attention from Big Oil, from the petrochemical industry, specifically on this point.

As you well know, Lisa, the American Chemistry Council, which is a industry group, issued a statement not long after your piece came out from ProPublica. And they say in that statement, quote, "ProPublica's article on pyrolysis based advanced recycling, unfortunately, misses the essential benefit of pyrolysis oil output. A barrel of pyrolysis oil generated, helps keep a barrel of fossil derived resources in the ground." I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that.

SONG: I would just say that we don't actually know that's true, on a one-to-one basis. They're assuming that every time you make a hundred pounds of lighter fluid, or paint or something from pyrolysis derived chemicals, that you are not having to drill the same amount of new crude oil out of the ground to make that same lighter fluid or paint. We don't know that's true. And there's actually some research that shows sometimes when more recycling is available or people see that more sustainable options are available, they may actually increase the net amount of consumption.

They may increase the total amount of stuff they're buying, or the total amount of stuff they're throwing away, because the availability of some kind of recycling or green products helps alleviate some guilt. There's a lot of more research we need to know that this is happening. And also, I think a lot of what my reporting tried to focus on was the confusion from the consumer end.

When consumers go into stores, right now, and they see a water bottle that's labeled, this contains 50% recycled plastic or 20%. That is going to be something made out of regular mechanical recycling. And that percentage, whether it's 10% or 20% has a pretty strong basis. And in reality, you can physically track and weigh plastic that is recycled through the regular mechanical recycling method.

But as pyrolysis gets going more and more, and if consumers start going to stores and seeing some kind of plastic wrap or food packaging that's labeled 20% recycled, based on mass balance, the average consumer has no idea how mass balance works. They're not going to know that the thing they're buying could be labeled 20% recycled, but in reality only contains maybe 2% recycled material.

And so I hope that my article will help consumers be on the lookout for these kinds of labels when they see them, and help them think critically when they start seeing this type of marketing.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And I think critical thinking is really important part of the long term environmental solutions that we need to find.

Because Anthony, what Lisa says brings to mind, like when we go to the store now and we see packaging that says, I don't know, 10%, 15%, 20% post consumer product, do we really fully understand as individuals what even that means right now?

SCHIAVO: I think it's hard. First of all, there's plenty of examples of products not containing what they're advertised to contain.

But I think it's hard to for a consumer to really wrap their head around the system, that this recycling ecosystem is, it's very complex. It has a lot of moving parts, and it's not necessarily a given that one particular approach is more sustainable than the other. So we're really focusing this whole sustainability question through the lens of consumer choice, right?

Through the lens of which product you choose to buy on the shelf. And I don't think that's a really good way to think about this issue at all. It's a big system. We need systemic solutions. Comprehensive regulation that helps us reduce the impact of the plastics we do produce, helps reduce the total amount of plastics we do, and ultimately make sure that those are managed responsibly at end of life.

Whether that's through pyrolysis, mechanical recycling, landfilling, or any other end of life technique. This really shouldn't be a consumer issue at all.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, but you know what this is making me think? I hear Lisa loud and clear when she says, yes, there are potentially reusable oil products created through pyrolysis that could go into a new gallon of paint.

That is part of the outputs here, when talking about plastics pyrolysis. But at the same time, we don't know if that necessarily means one fewer barrel of oil is coming out of the ground. Anthony, isn't this uncertainty a problem that plagues all sorts of recycling technologies, old and new?

Because I think the externalities are A, really hard to measure. And B, you have to decide which externalities you want to measure. Is it original fuel consumption? Is it original materials consumption? Is it greenhouse gas emissions? Is it the cost of transporting materials across thousands of miles?

And the reason why I point that out is, there was a time where people were thinking, Hey, are brown paper bags better or worse than plastic bags, right? Because the brown paper bags themselves carried all sorts of externalities in their production and recycling. Can we ever come up with a system that would say, yes, this is demonstrably better for the environment as a whole, then another form of recycling?

SCHIAVO: Yeah, it's tricky, and every sustainability choice always comes with tradeoffs. There's very few that don't have attached baggage. One of the ones that doesn't have any real attached baggage, however, is source reduction, right? So just reducing the amount of plastic consumption.

That's one of the very few things that doesn't really have a tradeoff, especially if you can still maintain the integrity or the quality of that product and packaging. Ultimately though, that's why I keep coming back to regulation, the role of public policy is to really help decide these things.

If we leave it up to industry or if we leave it up to individual consumer choice, I think we're gonna get a very fragmented approach in this, and we really do need something comprehensive. That's why we're tracking very closely the UN effort, almost like a Paris Agreement for plastics.

Hopefully that will begin to at least set some shared definitions, which are honestly still lacking in this space. And we can move forward with a bit more consensus from there.

CHAKRABARTI: There's one more voice I want to get in here. It's Bethanie Carney Almroth, who's a professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

And she has concerns about the ability of pyrolysis recycling to sustainably, and that's the key word here, sustainably reduce plastic waste at a significant scale.

BETHANIE CARNEY ALMROTH: None of these technologies have been shown to function at scale. They have not been shown to be economically or environmentally viable. Any sort of solutions that are aimed downstream at the waste stage are good for the industry, because they can keep producing.

We need to reduce the amount that we're producing, waste management systems and infrastructures, including recycling cannot handle the plastics as they already.

CHAKRABARTI: Lisa, let me turn to you because over and over again, this is the point that I think rings loud and true in the conversation we've had today. That no amount of new technologies around recycling is going to be enough to really do something meaningful about the plastic waste problem on planet Earth. I'm seeing numbers here that say we're not that many years off from generating more than a billion new metric tons of plastics every year. That's double where we are right now. Lisa, where do you think consumers do come into all of this?

SONG: I think that we shouldn't blame consumers for what's happening.

We're extremely limited. If we think that our individual shopping choices can solve this problem, because they can't. One of the big issues out there is that there's a lot of stuff that we buy every day that comes in unnecessary plastic, or plastic that we didn't ask for, right?

When you buy a t-shirt online from a store and it gets shipped to your house, the t-shirt's probably going to come wrapped in a plastic bag that's inside the plastic shipping bag that the postal service used. You didn't ask for that inside layer of plastic bag, right? And there are some companies that have stopped using those extra plastic bags. Or when you go to the grocery store and you buy a box of pasta, why do the cardboard boxes of pasta always have that little plastic window there?

We all know what pasta looks like. None of us asked for pasta to be packaged in that way. And I know these are kind of silly examples, but it just shows that there's a lot that is systemic, that is outside of the consumers' control. And so I think if we expect consumers alone to solve this, it's not going to happen.

It really does have to come from the top down, in terms of systemic industry changes. And that's going to mean some kind of regulation.

CHAKRABARTI: With that thought, Lisa Song, let me tell you, thank you so very much for being part of this inaugural collaborative episode between On Point and ProPublica. Thank you so much for joining us.

SONG: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: And Lisa is a reporter who covers the environment, energy, and climate change for ProPublica. We have been talking about her article, “The ‘delusion’ of advanced plastic recycling." And by the way, Lisa's got a brand-new article. It's out today. Following up on this issue, that's headlined "When Is “Recyclable” Not Really Recyclable? When the Plastics Industry Gets to Define What the Word Means." So definitely take a look at that.

And Anthony Schiavo, senior director and principal analyst at Lux Research. It was terrific to have you, Anthony. Thank you so very much.

SCHIAVO: Thank you so much.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. This is On Point.