Exxon Mobil's 'Advanced' Technique for Recycling Plastic? Burning It (yahoo.com) 13
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times:
In recent years — as longstanding efforts to recycle plastics have faltered — Exxon Mobil has touted advanced recycling as a groundbreaking technology that will turn the tide on the plastic crisis. But despite its seemingly eco-friendly name, the attorney general's lawsuit denounced advanced recycling as a "public relations stunt" that largely involves superheating plastics to convert them into fuel.
At Exxon Mobil's only "advanced recycling" facility in Baytown, Texas, only 8% of plastic is remade into new material, while the remaining 92% is processed into fuel that is later burned. [California attorney general Rob] Bonta's lawsuit seeks a court order to prohibit the company from describing the practice as "advanced recycling," arguing the vast majority of plastic is destroyed. Many environmental advocates and policy experts lauded the legal action as a major step toward ending greenwashing by Exxon Mobil — the world's largest producer of single-use plastic polymer... Advanced recycling, which is also called chemical recycling, is an umbrella term that typically involves heating or dissolving plastic waste to create fuel, chemicals and waxes — a fraction of which can be used to remake plastic. The most common techniques yield only 1% to 14% of the plastic waste, according to a 2023 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Exxon Mobil has largely used reclaimed plastic for fuel production while ramping up its virgin plastic production, according to Bonta.
The executive director of California Communities Against Toxics complains Exxon Mobil's "advanced" recycling is "the same technology we've had since the Industrial Revolution... a blast furnace." (The article also quotes her as asking "How is that better than coal?") And a UCLA researcher who studied the issue blames misperceptions about plastic recycling on "an industry-backed misinformation campaign." He agrees that the reality is "having to burn more oil to turn that plastic back into oil, which you then burn."
California's attorney general "alleges Exxon Mobil has had a patent for this technology since 1978, and the company is falsely rebranding it as 'new' and 'advanced'... It recently reemerged after the company learned that the term 'advanced recycling' resonated with members of the public..."
At Exxon Mobil's only "advanced recycling" facility in Baytown, Texas, only 8% of plastic is remade into new material, while the remaining 92% is processed into fuel that is later burned. [California attorney general Rob] Bonta's lawsuit seeks a court order to prohibit the company from describing the practice as "advanced recycling," arguing the vast majority of plastic is destroyed. Many environmental advocates and policy experts lauded the legal action as a major step toward ending greenwashing by Exxon Mobil — the world's largest producer of single-use plastic polymer... Advanced recycling, which is also called chemical recycling, is an umbrella term that typically involves heating or dissolving plastic waste to create fuel, chemicals and waxes — a fraction of which can be used to remake plastic. The most common techniques yield only 1% to 14% of the plastic waste, according to a 2023 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Exxon Mobil has largely used reclaimed plastic for fuel production while ramping up its virgin plastic production, according to Bonta.
The executive director of California Communities Against Toxics complains Exxon Mobil's "advanced" recycling is "the same technology we've had since the Industrial Revolution... a blast furnace." (The article also quotes her as asking "How is that better than coal?") And a UCLA researcher who studied the issue blames misperceptions about plastic recycling on "an industry-backed misinformation campaign." He agrees that the reality is "having to burn more oil to turn that plastic back into oil, which you then burn."
California's attorney general "alleges Exxon Mobil has had a patent for this technology since 1978, and the company is falsely rebranding it as 'new' and 'advanced'... It recently reemerged after the company learned that the term 'advanced recycling' resonated with members of the public..."
It's a Scam (Score:4, Insightful)
Plastic recycling is 95% scan, 5% facade justification for the scam.
Time to go back to wood (Score:4, Insightful)
Apart from some specialty stuff like teflone and silicone, we'll just have to go back to lignin/cellulose based chemistry.
Re: (Score:2)
That's nice to say, but you have to think about what the goal actually is with plastic products.
Take food packaging, for example. Why does a box of cereal come packaged in thick plastic bags inside the cardboard box, or granola bars in aluminized plastic wrappers, or whatnot? The answer is gas permeability. How long your food lasts is directly proportional to how much access oxygen and water vapour have to them. The polymers (sometimes multilayered) that are used have *extremely* low permeability, and th
I don't get it (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's fine for thermoplastics and it's fine so long as you don't care about eg what colour it is. Not all plastics respond to heat by melting (there are quite a wide variety of plastics that undergo polymerisation with heat, so heating them makes them more solid, not less), but the big problem of this kind of direct-use recycling is that it only works if you can first sort the plastic into all the different types and colours. There are only a middle-sized handful of basic plastic types, but there are a d
Re: (Score:2)
The difference is you're dealing with clean feedstock streams of specific, pure plastics with the exact composition you're looking for. That's not the real world. Plastics are immensely diverse (even within a given category, like ABS or PLA), with very impure feedstock streams, with many plastic products even containing multiple types of plastic on the same product.
They're not completely wrong (Score:3)
Well, compared to making plastic and then dumping it, and compared to pulling fuel out of the ground and burning it, this is actually an improvement - the carbon is used twice, once as a plastic and then again as a fuel. It's not exactly a circular economy though.
The best you can do. Just don't call it recycling. (Score:2, Interesting)
Drop the facade. Plastic is fuel with very useful extra steps. The amount of plastic that we produce is dwarfed by the amount of fossil fuels we turn into CO2 without that great intermediate form. Turning plastic waste into fuel is the right way to get rid of it.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. I hate greenwashing, but getting mad at turning plastic into fuel is beyond stupid. And what exactly does the date of the patent have to do with anything, vs. the date at which you're technologically and economically able to make the first production-scale unit? Do they have this notion that patents are always issued just days before the product becomes viable at scale? That's not how the real-world works.
Plastics are a feedstock that is immensely diverse, varying impure, and whose products have
Surprised?! (Score:2)
Meanwhile, they're increasing plastics production as much as they can to increase profits.
Here's a new improved, advanced technology idea, framed in a way that ExxonMobil can relate to:
"In light of the pressing exigencies surrounding contemporary environmental stewardship and the overarching imperative to safeguard natural ecosystems for the collective benefit of present and future stakehold
why are they charging us for platic bags? (Score:2)
Sounds good (Score:2)
It's turned into a useful product instead of being dumped in a landfill or the ocean. If we ever stop burning fuel then we can worry about recycling it into non-fuel.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. Once you depolymerize it, you're going to turn it into whatever is cheapest for those feedstocks at that point in time. In this era, we burn lots of fuel, so that's what they mostly become. If that changes, the product stream will change. It's really that simple.
I'm really happy to finally see this technology being done at scale. It's taken a long time to get to this point, to get the process efficient enough to be practical.
Cannot we dump plastic in plates subduction zones? (Score:2)
Seems like win-win:
1. we get rid of the plastic
2. we get rid of carbon
Long term it might be a problem as we may need carbon but short term it looks like some kind of a solution...