Recycling black plastics: Real vs fake news – Recycling black plastics - Arhive

Another day, another mainstream news outlet talking about the devil that is black plastic.

Black Plastic

It cannot be recycled they say, and it is dumped into the oceans as a result. The need is more investment (hence government funding) to create technologies that can magically turn black plastic into gold dust.

The problem with all the stories is they are wrong. Dare I say it – ‘FAKE NEWS’.

Black plastic can, and is, widely recycled. Anyone who has got on their back and crawled under their brand new motor (so not many of us) will testify that they are lined with sheets of black polypropylene – almost always sourced from recycling streams to meet the sustainability goals and marketing needs being pursued by the major carmakers, and don’t forget those black drainage pipes criss-crossing the European country side, full of recycled (black) polyethylene.

Such is the demand, one European compounder has a demand of ~70,000 tonnes a year of black polypropylene alone.

These black recycled materials are extracted from waste streams using various technical techniques, but almost always involving a density separation whether in water or other solutions to produce valuable marketable black recycled plastic. It is a low cost and simplistic method of extracting value and allows for a profitable business with many of the successful recyclers through Europe running similar models.

However it’s not all ‘fake news’ because the elephant in the room is black PET packaging trays. Thousands of these shiny black trays line the supermarket shelves, destined for one use, before ending up in the furnaces which generate electricity from waste across Northern Europe. The reason for this waste is less technical and more founded in the principles Adam Smith set forth in the ‘Wealth of Nations’ 250 years ago – free market economics.

The fables we read in the mainstream media almost daily now talk about how ‘black’ plastic cannot be seen by today’s optical sorting systems – a fallacy on its own as many companies at K 2016 were all too happy to show, albeit at reduced yields and throughput. But it is not the colour, but the plastic used which is the problem.

Ask yourself – what day-to-day object is made from black PET? None come immediately to mind except for black food trays. Even more challenging a question: what can it therefore be recycled into post-use?

Black plastic

Answer:nothing of significance.

A WRAP study published in 2015 looked at developing end markets for PET, and although focused on clear PET, it did identify that black PET could be used in making plastic pallets – the demand for which would be a paltry 2,000 tonnes per annum. To put that number into perspective in the UK alone, there was 1,000,000 tonnes of non-recycled plastic packaging in 2016.

The simple reason for this is the cost involved in turning black PET waste back into food grade plastic – it’s not uneconomical. In fact it is simply cheaper to buy brand new PET than recycle the material leaving huge mountains of black PET languishing with no further use.

With no end market, there is no incentive for recyclers to invest in the technology, or divert their existing systems to recover the black plastic PET. While investing time and money into developing technology to deal with black plastic will bring other incremental benefits, and investing in new technologies such as the ‘blue-black’ plastic resins being developed by numerous parties are technically interesting, they will not solve the problem.

But why are packaging manufacturers using plastics they know (or ought to know) are not reused?

The answer is once again economics.

The properties of PET allow a thinner walled tray to be produced. Thinner walls mean less weight. Less weight means a lower PRN (packaging recovery note) liability. Lower liability means lower costs and higher profits – there is no financial incentive on the manufacturers ensuring the packaging material is actually reused.

I have long advocated that the solution to the recycling problem is to pass the responsibility that a product is recycled and actually made into something else onto the manufacturer in the way of tax or tax breaks.

We’ve already discussed how black r-PP is highly demanded by the car industry, so why are packaging manufacturers not making their trays out of PP? PP will increase their manufacturing cost, and their PRN liability (through increased weight) and hence they continue to use PET.

However, should you switch the PRN liability into how much plastic fails to make it back into a new product then one of two things will happen:

production will switch to a plastic which has an end market (such as rPP), or; the manufacturers will generate an end market for products made from black rPET.

Either way, the only solution in this writer’s mind to solve the problem of black plastic is by going back to the economic basics and providing a free market economy pull through radical reform of current government and European Commission policies.

Steven Burns is Commercial Director for Impact Solutions, the home of the Scottish Plastic Recycling Centre of Excellence.