Welcome to the Plastics Weekly, NEO’s regular news monitoring of the plastics industry.
Every week, we publish a roundup of the top developments in plastics and sustainability – from regulatory changes to company news.
This week’s highlights:
- A major Exxon-backed initiative to clean up plastic waste has fallen way short of its goals, according to a Bloomberg Green investgation. When it was formed in 2019, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste announced plans to invest up to $1.5 billion over five years to “advance solutions to eliminate plastic waste in the environment.” But the organisation is dominated by plastics-producing petrochemical companies, and its efforts are scarcely making an impact. (Bloomberg)
- SABIC and Scientex have partnered to convert ocean-bound plastics into flexible polypropylene packaging. The companies will work together on chemically recycling ‘ocean-bound’ plastic waste (OBP), which will be converted into pyrolysis oil. This will then become an alternative feedstock for SABIC to produce polypropylene, which will be processed to create a BOPP film for Scientex to manufacture and print noodle packs. (Packaging Europe)
- Companies are spending billions of dollars to develop chemical recycling technologies and infrastructure, but is the process a viable solution to fighting plastic waste? A new market report by IDTechEx, “Chemical Recycling and Dissolution of Plastics 2023-2033,” forecasts that companies using pyrolysis and depolymerization will recycle more than 20 million tonnes of plastic per year by 2033. While that forecast is encouraging, critics say that even if it were to become reality, chemical recycling alone won’t be enough to tackle the 400 million tonnes of plastic waste produced globally each year. (Plastics Today)