Plastics companies know about chemical recycling’s shortcomings — but still sell it as a solution todayheadline

For years, the plastics industry’s narrative about recycling has been falling apart. Research and media investigations have revealed that it doesn’t make economic sense and that petrochemical companies have used it more as a public relations gambit than as a serious effort to mitigate the plastic pollution crisis. Conventional recycling has processed only 9 percent of plastic waste globally, leaving the rest to be landfilled, incinerated, or littered.

Rather than reducing the production of plastic, which is made out of fossil fuels, many companies have begun promoting a supposedly more effective solution: “advanced recycling,” also known as “chemical recycling.” These terms refer to several different processes that use heat and pressure to break plastic into its chemical building blocks. These building blocks can then, in theory, be turned back into new plastic products. 

According to plastics and fossil fuel companies, advanced recycling is a new “breakthrough” innovation that will enable a “circular economy” for plastics by making the material infinitely recyclable. It can supposedly handle mixed postconsumer plastic while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. “Thanks to advanced recycling technologies, it’s possible to recycle more plastic than ever before,” as the Plastics Industry Association, a trade group, has put it. 

But these companies’ internal communications, as well as expert analyses and statements some plastics industry groups provided to trade publications, paint a less optimistic picture: Chemical recycling processes are costlier and more technologically challenging than industry advertisements make them seem. A new report from the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity highlights the discrepancy between fossil fuel and plastics companies’ public and private statements, suggesting that they have knowingly oversold the efficacy of chemical recycling. 

“They’re claiming it’s a solution and it’s not, and they know it,” said Davis Allen, a senior investigative researcher at the Center for Climate Integrity and the report’s author.

Allen’s report follows up on research he published last year about the “fraud of plastics recycling,” which focused mostly on conventional methods known as mechanical recycling. This new report draws from publicly available documents to refute industry claims about chemical recycling, starting with the idea that it’s novel. Although companies and industry groups have repeatedly used terms like “brand new” and “revolutionary” to describe chemical recycling, the technologies it encompasses were first patented 70 years ago. In an early wave of excitement, industry groups in the 1970s promoted one technique called pyrolysis as a “more logical approach” to deal with plastic waste compared to conventional recycling. 

After a brief resurgence in the late 1980s and early ’90s, this enthusiasm petered out by the end of the century as several chemical recycling ventures were abandoned. According to the report, one Exxon Chemical employee told staffers during a 1994 industry conference that pyrolysis was a “fundamentally uneconomical process.”

By 2016 or so, amid an explosion in public awareness over plastic pollution, industry groups once again began hyping up chemical recycling, this time with aggressive targets for specific amounts of plastic it would supposedly be able to process. Chevron Phillips Chemical, for example, advertised in 2023 that it would produce 1 billion pounds of polyethylene resin made with chemically recycled material annually by 2030. 

However, as was the case decades ago, companies’ public hype has obscured internal doubt about the feasibility of scaling up chemical recycling. The report cites consulting firm analyses — some of them commissioned by plastics industry groups or presented at industry conferences — concluding that chemical recycling is “currently not economically feasible” and inappropriate for 2025 sustainability goals. In 2023, Bain & Company warned the industry that it shouldn’t rely on chemical recycling to achieve 2030 sustainability targets because it “won’t be available on a large scale by the end of this decade.” Industry organizations like the Flexible Packaging Association likewise said in 2020 that chemical recycling “likely will not be a major driver for recycling until the 2040 time frame.”

In a particularly stark expression of the gap between marketing and reality, Exxon Mobil acknowledged earlier this year that since operations began three years ago, it had only managed to process 70 million pounds of plastic waste at its chemical recycling facilities in Baytown, Texas. That means that over the course of three years, the company processed only 7 percent of the 1 billion pounds it previously said it would be able to handle annually by the end of 2026. 

Despite claims that chemical recycling can process items that are “difficult to recycle and not suitable for mechanical methods,” such as potato chip bags, motor oil bottles, and diapers, insiders have acknowledged a more complicated situation: Mixed plastic introduces contaminants that lead to lower yields, lower-quality products, and additional expense, according to recent reports from industry groups including the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. In 2021, the president of the trade group the Association of Plastic Recyclers told Plastics News that the plastic that actually gets processed at chemical recycling plants “has essentially come from internal, postindustrial plant scrap, not something that’s been out in the consumer world.”

Internal documents from Exxon Mobil, uncovered in a groundbreaking lawsuit filed last fall by the California attorney general’s office, show that the company has acknowledged internally that “not all post-use plastics are appropriate for chemical recycling.” 

Finally, the report contrasts claims that chemical recycling is an “enabler” of circularity or that it can “produce fully circular outputs” with comments from analysts and industry groups. Only a fraction of the plastic processed via chemical recycling technologies can actually be turned back into plastic — the rest is mostly turned into fuel, which “does not help close the plastics loop,” as the consulting firm Roland Berger put it in a 2022 report. An employee of the chemical company BASF said during a 2022 interview with DW that chemical recycling would never create a “100 percent closed loop” because “you always will need to have some fossil resources.”

Grist reached out to 11 industry groups and nine petrochemical companies mentioned in the report. The American Chemistry Council and Plastics Industry Association criticized the report as the work of an “activist” group and said it misrepresented progress on chemical recycling technologies. The Plastics Industry Association said the “fiction writers” at the Center for Climate Integrity should look at one of its public relations campaigns showing videos of people working at chemical recycling facilities. The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers said chemical recycling is needed to manage growing demand for plastic products, but that it should be only “part of the strategy, along with mechanical recycling, improved waste management and collection, and better product design to optimize recyclability and maximize reuse.” Two industry groups — the Association of Plastic Recyclers and the Flexible Packaging Association — declined to comment.

Eastman Chemical did not directly address any of the claims made in the report, but said its chemical recycling facility in Tennessee can process more than 240 million pounds of polyester annually. The company said it’s investing more than $1 billion to bring chemical recycling to a second facility in Texas “in the coming years.” Exxon Mobil said chemical recycling technology “makes sense” and that it is investing more than $200 million to expand it in the U.S. and Europe. Six of the other companies did not respond, and LyondellBasell referred Grist to the American Chemistry Council. 

Only the National Recycling Coalition seemed to agree, at least in part, with the Center for Climate Integrity’s report. The organization’s executive director, Charles Kamenides, said that processes that convert plastics into fuels, gases, oils, or waxes don’t meet its definition of recycling. Chemical recycling facilities engaged in these processes, he said, “do not reduce plastic pollution” and “harm humans.” He said his organization “supports a hierarchy of waste management preferences that prioritizes reducing the production and consumption of plastics.”

Andrew Rollinson, an independent chemical engineering consultant unaffiliated with the Center for Climate Integrity, agreed with the entirety of the report: Chemical recycling “certainly is a fraud,” he said. “It hasn’t gone anywhere in 50 years, it won’t go anywhere in another 50 years, and it won’t go anywhere in 500 years.” He said a follow-up report could flesh out some of the technical reasons for these poor prospects, like what he described as chemical recycling’s very high energy use and vexing contamination issues. 

Allen said he hopes the report will become a resource for organizations taking legal action against fossil fuel and plastics companies. Many lawsuits have already been filed — including California’s case against Exxon Mobil — but so far, most have focused on plastic pollution and the industry’s disingenuous promotion of mechanical recycling. 

“The vast majority of information about advanced recycling out there is produced by the industry itself,” Allen said. “We hope that when we zero into the specific claims that are being made, this then provides context to understand whether those claims are true.”