The Plastic Paradox

Plastics have transformed modern society, offering unprecedented versatility and durability. From lightweight food packaging and household essentials such as toothbrushes to high-tech components in aerospace and electronics, they have come to be the cornerstone of countless industries.

Yet, their near-indestructibility has also created an enduring environmental dilemma. Most of the plastics ever manufactured since the 1950s – estimated at over 8.3 billion tons – are still with us. Of this, a mind-boggling 5 billion tons are languishing in landfills or littering our bio-habitats, oceans and water bodies.
The real crisis isn’t the plastics themselves but our failure to manage their end-of-life effectively. For decades, we’ve neglected sustainable recycling and disposal methods, allowing the problem to snowball into today’s crisis.

Single-Use Plastics: India’s Growing Concern

In India, the numbers on plastic waste paint a sobering picture. The country consumed 15.4 million metric tons of plastic in 2018, with about 60% of this allocated for packaging. Of this, 70% comprised flexible formats such as pouches for packaging food, with residual 30% used for rigid packaging, such as for bottling shampoos and water.

Flexible packaging is lightweight and cost-efficient but is predominantly designed for single-use. According to data based on Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) reports, India generates approximately 10.2 million tonnes of plastic waste annually. Alarmingly, single-use plastics account for 43% of this total. Waste characterisation studies indicate that flexible packaging films, such as grocery bags, make up a significant portion of municipal plastic waste, with some estimates showing that they account for as much as 90% of the plastics in landfills. In a country where 75% of FMCG products are packaged using flexible plastics, our inability to recycle such material presents the foremost challenge in our journey toward building a sustainable economy for plastics.

The Recycling Gap: Why Current Methods Aren’t Enough

Why can’t single-use plastics be efficiently recycled using conventional mechanical methods, which involve washing, cleaning and extruding plastics into recycled pellets? This is because mechanical recycling is best configured to work with clean, single-resin materials such as PET or HDPE bottles. In contrast, single-use plastics found in municipal waste are a mix of different types of plastics (such as HDPE, LDPE, PP, PS, PVC, PET) and are often combined with co-polymers and materials such as aluminium films, additives, adhesives and printed inks. These plastics are frequently contaminated with food residues, dirt, moisture and other pollutants. Recycling such plastics through conventional mechanical methods is challenging and when feasible, the resulting recyclates are of poor quality and low economic value. These materials are typically inferior to virgin plastics, limiting their potential for high-quality applications and reducing the incentives for their widespread recycling.

Chemical Recycling: Closing the Loop on Plastics

Addressing such limitations, the up-and-coming chemical recycling sector has emerged today as the most promising solution to recycle low-grade municipal plastics, while simultaneously offering a pathway for creating a closed-loop, plastic-to-plastic circular economy.

Unlike mechanical recycling, which operates at the article level, chemical recycling works at the molecular level. Innovative processes such as pyrolysis, breaks down hard-to-recycle polyolefin plastics from municipal waste streams into their fundamental molecular hydrocarbon components, known as oligomers. These basic building blocks can then be reconstituted again to produce renewable materials, including circular plastics, sustainable chemicals and renewable fuels, enabling a more sustainable approach to plastic waste management.

Importantly, circular plastics produced through pyrolysis are chemically identical to those made from crude oil, ensuring they meet the stringent quality requirements for applications like food and pharmaceutical packaging. This technology creates a pathway for a true plastic-to-plastic circular economy, where challenging waste streams – such as single-use polythene bags and ketchup bottles contaminated with food residues – can be endlessly recycled in a closed-loop system, significantly reducing environmental impact.

Additionally, with the products generated from the conversion process having limitless demand as circular chemical feedstocks, the technology presents strong return-on-investment, making it attractive to stakeholders across the value chain.

Reimagining Plastics: Turning Challenges into Sustainable Solutions

India has been proactive in tackling plastic waste through its Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) framework, one of the world’s most comprehensive systems. This framework requires stakeholders across the value chain to manage the lifecycle of their plastic products, mandating recycling, reuse and the inclusion of recycled content in packaging. The guidelines set enhanced targets for recycling, ranging from 30% for flexible packaging to 50% for rigid waste plastics. Importantly, they also require the inclusion of 10% recycled content in packaging for flexibles and 30% for rigid plastics, with some portion of this needing to come from chemical recycling.

Plastic waste management is on the brink of a revolutionary transformation, with advancements in the next 5-10 years projected to surpass the progress made over the past half-century. As demand for sustainable packaging intensifies and regulatory frameworks increasingly mandate circular solutions, advanced recycling technologies are emerging as key innovations – capable of transforming waste plastics from an environmental liability they currently are, into a valuable above-ground hydrocarbon resource that they can be.

(The author is the founder and CEO of PolyCycl, a company specialising in chemical recycling technology solutions for a plastic-to-plastic circular economy)