Lisa Song: 1/ Last year, I became obsessed with a plastic cup. The cup was made via pyrolysis — a kind of chemical recycling I'd heard a lot about. The plastics industry made pyrolysis sound magical. It was a way to turn hard-to-recycle plastics into new plastic. So I tried to buy the cup…

1/ Last year, I became obsessed with a plastic cup. The cup was made via pyrolysis — a kind of chemical recycling I'd heard a lot about. The plastics industry made pyrolysis sound magical. It was a way to turn hard-to-recycle plastics into new plastic. So I tried to buy the cup…

2/ but couldn’t. The companies behind the cup didn’t answer detailed questions about the cup’s availability or how it was made. The PR spin around pyrolysis made me think my used grocery bags and candy wrappers would soon be made into new products. So where were they?

3/ Months of reporting revealed an inconvenient truth. Not much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the plastic crisis. Here are the main things I learned: www.propublica.org/article/delu...

The Delusion of “Advanced” Plastic Recyclingwww.propublica.org The plastics industry has heralded a type of chemical recycling it claims could replace new shopping bags and candy wrappers with old ones — but not much is being recycled at all, and this method won’...

4/ First, pyrolysis is inefficient. Most of the plastic that goes into pyrolysis doesn’t actually end up as new plastic. Only 15% - 20% of the plastic waste you feed into the process is turned into new plastic. (It could go higher or lower depending on certain factors.)

5/ The plastic that comes out of pyrolysis contains very little recycled content: less than 10%. Most of the resulting plastic comes from regular fossil fuels. But companies can use something called “mass balance” to market these products as 20%, 30% or even 100% recycled.

6/ Mass balance is a kind of mathematical sleight of hand. With it, companies can label products as containing more recycled, or “circular” content, than they physically have. Europe has started to regulate mass balance; the U.S. hasn’t.

7/ The American Chemistry Council, a major plastics lobby, says mass balance is a “well-known methodology” that’s been used by industries like fair trade chocolate, and that it’s impossible to know whether a particular plastic molecule came from recycled or fossil fuel feedstock.

Assuming attempts at plastic recycling and reuse as largely useless, what's the current word on trying to use something like plasma gasification to actually eliminate/make safe plastic and other commercial & home waste?

Soo useless plastic waste gets turned into useful plastic and useful chemicals Sounds good to me, what's wrong?

Thank you.

There you go

I’ve been pushing our city to go zero waste or at least ban plastic bags or something. A start. Nothing is happening though.

This has got be one of the most ridiculous rationalizations I've ever heard. It's like making a batch of cookies and saying half are sugar-free, while the other half contain double sugar. Anyway, thank you for your hard and I'm sure at times frustrating work on this story.

This article is so thorough and well written. Thank you

Very discouraging, though. When are we going to get serious?

Well if we didn't with the climate stuff...

This was a fantastic piece, Lisa, as was your May piece on the UN plastic-free conference - thanks so much for doing this reporting. For lay readers like me with no science background, articles like this are so important and valuable! ❤️

🤔

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