It is becoming clear that our management of plastic waste is woefully underperforming. While there are some exciting things happening for plastic waste recovery, their scale is still small. Landfill will likely be the destination for many of the plastics, particularly film, without mechanical drivers for a circular economy.
The CSIRO says that just a five per cent boost to the recycling rate per year would create many jobs and add to the GDP. It also estimates that $100 billion would be required to get recycling rates up to 20-30 per cent by 2030.
APCO has reported the problems, including that the collection, sorting, and reprocessing of some materials, amounting to millions of tonnes of packaging, is uneconomical. It is clear that business as usual will not cut it.
It is interesting to look at some scenarios of plastic waste and the amount that will be recycled per year for the foreseeable years to come. Australia uses approximately four million tonnes of plastic per year. The consumption of plastic is forecast to grow by at least three per cent per year – doubling by 2050 with some saying it will triple (4.2 per cent growth per annum).
Limiting landfill
To keep plastic waste out of a landfill it has to either be:
- Made part of a circular economy where the plastic waste is returned to manufacturers to make similar products from it;
- Burned in a waste to energy plant, which at the moment there are only two about to commence operations in WA; or
- Repurposed to a use where it will be lost forever, such as road base.
Currently the amount of plastic recycled is claimed to be around 15 per cent. But this figure includes repurposing of plastic to other end-use functions, which is not the circular economy. The amount that is actually recycled and returned to original plastic manufacturers is much less. Assume for this article it is two per cent. Figure 1 shows the business-as-usual situation of recycling, increasing at an aspirational five per cent per year over the previous year.
Becoming more aggressive (see Fig 2), imagine we were able to increase recycling over that of the above by a factor of five, year on year to 20 per cent increase per year. Here it assumes that there will always be some residual plastic waste of approximately 20 per cent of that used that will never be recycled, and the recycling rate goes up in line with the usage rate once 80 per cent recycling is reached. This scenario has the actual recycled rate at 6 per cent by 2030.
If we get very optimistic and spend the $100 billion to get recycling up to 20 per cent by 2030 (see Fig 3). This would require increasing the recycling rate year on year by 43 per cent. Given our history this would be a very difficult number to reach.
What these plots show is that there will be considerable blue areas for the next decade or more and still significant blue area or plastic going to landfill (or perhaps waste to energy plants at that time), for years after that, no matter what scenario is modelled.
These models indicate a need for the next decade and beyond, to make plastic that can biodegrade away in a landfill as that is most likely where the waste will end up. As it biodegrades it can supply energy to the power plants using its biogas.
A seamless transition
Landfill biodegradable technology offers this transition from needing to landfill plastic waste into operating in a more circular economy. These plastics will biodegrade in landfills at an accelerated rate compared to conventional plastics, allowing some of their embodied energy to be utilised, yet still retain mainstream recyclability for when they can be recycled.
This article was first published in the May-June 2024 print issue of PKN Packaging News, p28.
