![Breaking It Down: The Chemical Recycling/Mass Balance Debate](http://plasticwastesolutions.com/wp-content/themes/seventeen/functions/timthumb.php?src=http://plasticwastesolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/recycledplastic.png&w=540&h=250&z=1&q=100)
Breaking It Down: The Chemical Recycling/Mass Balance Debate
Posted on July 24, 2024 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling
Proponents say mass balance negates the need to duplicate billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure to keep recycled and virgin materials separate throughout the value chain, thus enabling scale up. Opponents say making recycled claims on what can’t be physically traced is misleading.
Source: Breaking It Down: The Chemical Recycling/Mass Balance Debate
“There was a bit of a fight in the E.U. among different groups of recyclers. The concern was pyrolysis operators could get credit allocations they should not get for co-products that are not turned into plastics. And mechanical and other recyclers would not have a level playing field,” Bell says.
That is where the debate really heats up: determining which products and co-products get credits.
There are three main methods, from those that assign credits liberally to stricter models.
The most lax is “free allocation.” That’s what chemical companies want, says Simon Hann, managing consultant at Eunomia Research & Consulting.
“This approach allows the freedom to allocate credit to whatever product they want. Then there is “fuel exempt,” which says you can allocate credits to anything except fuels (e.g., petro chemicals that may not go into plastics as well as monomers for plastics get credits), which may be 30 percent of what comes out of the steam cracker. And there is “polymers only,” where you can allocate only to what will go to polymers [primarily ethylene or propylene], which is about another 30 or 40 percent,” Hann says.
The debate lately is centered around whether fuel should count as “recycled material”— at least in the U.S. In Europe, fuel is not under consideration.
“This is where a lot of skepticism around free allocation comes in. Some organizations are calling for mass balance claims to be adjusted to ensure no credits are passed to fuel,” Thompson says.
Discussion · No Comments
There are no responses to "Breaking It Down: The Chemical Recycling/Mass Balance Debate". Comments are closed for this post.Oops! Sorry, comments are closed at this time. Please try again later.