Page 57 - Plastics News July 2024

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

he showdown between recycled and virgin PQ Recycling, recalled starting his career back in the
plastic resins, recycling can’t prevail without 1970s.
Tmore supportive public policy, greater buy-in
from the public and other outside reinforcements, “Back then I believe there were about 50 to 60 PET
several plastics recycling leaders agreed in March. reclaimers in North America, and the return rate
was 30%,” he said. “Today there are about half, and
Two numbers make the scale of the imbalance the return rate is about 27%.”
clear. The recycling sector collects roughly 5 billion
pounds of bottles, films and other plastics for recy- New plastic production, on the other hand, has
cling each year in the U.S., according to the research gone gangbusters to the point of overkill, said Joel
and consulting firm Stina Inc. U.S. plastic producers, Morales, vice president of polyolefins Americas for
meanwhile, made more than 8 billion pounds of Chemical Market Analytics.
new resin just in the month of February, as tallied by China is a big driver, he said. Many new plants there
the American Chemistry Council, a national associa- are tied to fossil fuel refineries, insulating them from
tion of chemical manufacturers. low prices amid an oversupply, and projects are also

Far from the early days of plastic recycling, when trying to get ahead of anticipated regulation and
reclaimed resin was seen as a more cost-effective building difficulties. But it’s a global pattern.
and somewhat embarrassing alternative, recycled “From a virgin resin supplier perspective, we’ve only
plastic is now sought after in many contexts but out- added more capacity since last year, and we’ve re-
cheapened and outmatched by a worldwide glut of moved demand in the virgin forecast,” Morales said.
the new stuff. “It’s almost like people do exactly the opposite of
“If we don’t deal with the price differential, at the what we suggest they do.”
end of the day – I believe this – nothing we do mat- On the recycling side, companies and government
ters,” Stephen Alexander, president and CEO of the programs face a disjunction between supply and de-
Association of Plastic Recyclers, told an audience mand for recycled plastics, with simultaneously too
during Resource Recycling’s Plastics Recycling Con- much and too little material on hand. With curbside
ference in the Dallas area earlier this year. APR owns recycling flat for years, supply can fall short of sus-
Resource Recycling, Inc., which publishes this maga- tainability goals set by major brands, for example.
zine.
Courtesy of Stina Inc.
“Some call it headwinds we face, I call it the attacks
that we face across the board,” he added. “A lot of “The engineering and technology that we use today
us are here trying to solve a problem that someone is amazing compared to when we first started – we
else creates.” can do just about anything. The only thing we can’t
engineer is getting more bottles,” Smilow said. “It’s
That was one of many takeaways speakers shared not something that you can just go out and buy. It
at the annual conference, where around 2,500 at- exists only if people return the bottles and they’re
tendees gathered in Grapevine, Texas, for 20 ses- in some sort of a system where we can get those
sions that delved into product design, artificial in- bottles and make something of them, return them
telligence, chemical recycling techniques and other to the system.”
important trends. Scott Saunders, general manager for KW Plastics

The lay of the land in Alabama, said recycling must do a better job of

In a series of panel discussions, Alexander and oth- reaching mid-sized, mid-U.S. cities to get more in-
er experts painted a somber picture of an industry flow.
in some ways stuck in a rut, though they also identi- “We can build all the lines we want to build, so can
fied several levers that could help pry it out. George Jon,” Saunders said, referring to his co-panelist, Jon
Smilow, chief operating officer at New York-based

July 2024 PLASTICS NEWS 59