Shell Quietly Backs Away From Pledge To Increase 'Advanced Recycling' of Plastics (theguardian.com) 39
The energy giant Shell has quietly backed away from a pledge to rapidly increase its use of "advanced recycling," a practice oil and petrochemical producers have promoted as a solution to the plastics pollution crisis. From a report: "Advanced" or "chemical" recycling involves breaking down plastic polymers into tiny molecules that can be made into synthetic fuels or new plastics. The most common form, pyrolysis, does so using heat. Shell has invested in pyrolysis since 2019, touting it as a way to slash waste. That year, the company used oil made via pyrolysis in one of its Louisiana chemical plants for the first time. And it began publicizing a new goal for the technology: "Our ambition is to use 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year in our global chemicals plants by 2025."
But recently, the company rolled back that promise with little fanfare: "[I]n 2023 we concluded that the scale of our ambition to turn 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year into pyrolysis oil by 2025 is unfeasible," it said in its 2023 sustainability report, published in March. Reached for comment, a Shell spokesperson, Curtis Smith, said: "Our ambition, regardless of regulation, is to increase circularity and move away from a linear economy to one where products and materials are reused, repurposed and recycled."
But recently, the company rolled back that promise with little fanfare: "[I]n 2023 we concluded that the scale of our ambition to turn 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year into pyrolysis oil by 2025 is unfeasible," it said in its 2023 sustainability report, published in March. Reached for comment, a Shell spokesperson, Curtis Smith, said: "Our ambition, regardless of regulation, is to increase circularity and move away from a linear economy to one where products and materials are reused, repurposed and recycled."
Oh look! Recycling is an expensive proposition. (Score:3, Insightful)
Who couldn't have called this?
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Aside from everybody who knew the first thing about it? It was well-understood that recycling plastic was economically unfeasible from the second it was proposed.
Re:Oh look! Recycling is an expensive proposition. (Score:4, Informative)
Of course it's economically infeasible. In the short term and for companies that depend upon plastics. BUT. For long term economics it can be a disaster, as it causes health and environmental problems. Using the planet as a garbage dump is of course economical in the short term, it's why people do it.
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Taking on externalized costs is expensive. Too bad there is no political and financial incentive being used to factor in those externalized costs.
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It wasn't that long ago that this sort of thing was common. Resources were expensive, to repair your tools instead of making new ones. Don't have throw-away pots, keep using the same ones. Patch the old clothes. And so forth. Recycling is just the old model. What happened between then and now was the conspicuous consumption model, the idea that everything is incredibly cheap, isn't it great that we're a rich country, so just throw things away often and buy new ones. And most of these plastics are a par
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That's reuse, not recycling. That's why we have the Three R's - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In that order.
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"So I went and stupidly asked "What will you pay me to mow the lawn?" He just gave me a withering look probably thinking what the hell is wrong with me, and told me to go back inside"
Your father sounds way more tolerant than mine.
I would have gotten an ass whupping right there on the lawn & then would have had to cut the grass by myself while he watched
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Taking on externalized costs is expensive. Too bad there is no political and financial incentive being used to factor in those externalized costs.
^^ This, exactly. More people are aware of externalization, and have a primitive understanding of it, than was the case 5 years ago. But that's not nearly enough.
EVERYBODY should have this awareness top-of-mind. Public education at ALL levels should have as a mandatory part of its curriculum a 'corporate studies' course. It would make students aware of all aspects of corporate cost externalization, and the propaganda that helps them get away with it. The course material would include, but not be limited to:
Simply consume less (Score:2)
Order one less box from Amazon, keep your electronics an extra year, drive one less trip per week in your car, ...
order one less food delivery per month,
One big step would be for people who shopping is recreation and entertainment and have to buy yet another disposable shirt, pants, blouse, skirt,.... is to just consume less.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/publ... [europa.eu]
About 8% of European microplastics released to oceans are from synthetic textiles — globally, this figure is estimated at 16-35%. Between 200,000
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we've been lied to about recycling of plastic since at least the 1980s
https://climateintegrity.org/u... [climateintegrity.org]
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More than that, if we start effectively recycling plastics, then Shell doesn't get to sell more oil to create new plastics.
It's super surprising that they may have just been blowing smoke up everyone's asses on that one.
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Does it make sense that a company would want to sell a product for which they pay nothing?
Whether Shell is selling oil to make plastics, or recycled plastics themselves, their customer is the plastics consumer. Whether their input comes from the ground (free), or from recycled plastics (also free) doesn't really matter. What matters is the cost of processing that material. In this case, Shell found it costs less to use free stuff from the ground rather than free stuff from the garbage.
Re:Oh look! Recycling is an expensive proposition. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't that recycling plastics is *expensive*. The problem is that it is *unprofitable*.
To see what I mean, look at an oil refinery. Building an oil refinery is eye-wateringly expensive, between ten and fifty *billion* dollars. But they get built anyway because they easily earn profits.
Making plastic recycling less expensive *would* make it more profitable, and sure that's worth pursuing. But we shouldn't ignore the other side of the equation: the price at which you can sell the recycled output. You could raise that simply by taxing virgin plastic. That would make goods more expensive for consumers, sure, but not proportionally because vendors would economize on the huge volume of unnecessary plastics they use. Greater economies of scale would reduce recycled plastic prices. And, if you wanted to, you could take all the money you collect with the tax and just give it to consumers.
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The problem isn't that recycling plastics is *expensive*. The problem is that it is *unprofitable*.
Think again. The problem is that it's not *profitable enough*.
Shell kills all their eco-friendly projects not because they are unprofitable but because they simply aren't "profitable enough" when compared to pumping oil. I'm not even joking. Shell had solar farms and got rid of them because they weren't "profitable enough".
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What you're describing is an "economic loss". A financial profit can be an economic loss if it is less than the maximum profit an entity can make. You cannot expect a private company to accept an economic loss even if it is an operating profit, and if they say otherwise it's a not-very-believable lie.
This is why you need to avoid regulatory capture. If buying the regulations you want is on the table, anything other course of action is an economic loss. If the corporations don't run the government, the g
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That's why I said we should just tax their profits at 100%. They can avoid that tax by instead investing those profits in building renewable energy, like filling up the North Sea where they drill for oil and gas with wind turbines. Put some of that engineering skill into those things, and get a valuable asset out of it. Any profit from the turbines and solar panels would be taxed at the standard rate.
Don't give me any nonsense about them just shutting down and cutting off the oil. Their shareholders would n
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But, yes, it seems to make more sense to burn it directly (in a way that fully combusts it so it doesn't produce sooty particulates), rather than pyrolizing it, making oil from it, and then burning the oil.
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Unless the burning creates toxic chemicals. The general solution is only burning rubber and plastics in areas where poor people live, but it's highly unethical (which describes almost all business).
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"but it's highly unethical (which describes almost all business)."
So you are posting this from a public computer at the library while wearing woven grass clothing?
Blaming business for providing you with what you want at a price you are willing to pay would seem to be misguided.
Burning the plastics takes a high temperature fire with plenty of excess oxygen, an afterburner, and a scrubber. It is possible to do it cleanly, but I suspect it is one of those things that only works at large scale. So you will use
Re:I already recycle most of my plastics (Score:5, Informative)
Relevant takeaways here are:
If you turn your unrecyclable plastics (and a great many other things) into energy by feeding them into a crazy hot combustion chamber with crazy good scrubbing, it's arguably a really efficient use of a sorted civic waste stream.
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That is pretty much what we used to do here, before we started separating plastic. No idea what they do with it these days; apparently most of it cannot be recycled anyway.
Re:I already recycle most of my plastics (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition to CO2, this releases PM2.5 particulates, VOCs, and microplastics into the environment. Assuming you do your incinerating on your own property, you are releasing that stuff into *your* environment, and those of your neighbors.
A municipal incinerator would be a lot better for people in the area, but even those dump a lot of bad stuff into the air. Of course if you landfill.
The best answer to who to dispose of plastic is to stop using it where it isn't really needed. Everybody uses reusable bags for their groceries these days; in some places it's mandated. But the real problem is that nearly every product inside those bag uses prodigious amounts of unnecessary plastic; plastic that wouldn't have been used on the same products thirty or forty years ago.
Same strategy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Plastics recycling will never mitigate the harmful effects sufficiently. Meanwhile, plastics production, & therefore pollution, is accelerating & accumulating in every corner, nook, & cranny of our planet & there's no feasible way to clean it up.
Typical response: Let's sue the bastards!
Better response: Let's prosecute the criminals.
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They’ll just deflect with further malarky like the Clean Coal ads that were strategically timed a few years back. All BS, but it distracts folks long enough to kill regulatory momentum.
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Except you can't really prosecute - there's no clear crime. Violating regulations is not a criminal offense, it is a fining offence, at least in the US. Which means the governments response is limited to lawsuits, and they're severely understaffed for this due to decades long efforts to defang the watchdogs.
This is one key reason why corporations are not like people - they can and do get away with murder.
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50 freaking years!!! And, they still can't recycle plastic bottle caps! Argh!
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Typical response: Let's sue the bastards!
Better response: Let's prosecute the criminals.
The prerequisite for that to work is to re-define "criminals" in this case to be the C-suite occupants rather than "the corporation".
Alternatively, we could make corporations eligible for the death penalty. The corporation would be dissolved, and all assets would be confiscated by the government.
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cheapen the source of heat (Score:2)
Stop using plastic for so many useless things? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't bes (Score:2)
Put a tax on plastic (Score:2)
Well (Score:2)
But recently, the company rolled back that promise with little fanfare: "[I]n 2023 we concluded that the scale of our ambition to turn 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year into pyrolysis oil by 2025 is unfeasible," it said in its 2023 sustainability report, published in March.
Seems like a reasonable statement.
"People say true things, leftists freak out." Gets tiresome after awhile ...
Standardized containers (Score:2)
Why don't we as a country implement more standardized containers? We did it for soft drinks, surely we can do it for laundry detergent, food containers and much more. But also, fuck Shell.