Plastic production is increasing by at least 4% each year, with devastating environmental consequences.
The industry solution is to promote recycling. It has hired over 200 lobbyists to represent its case at the Global Plastics Treaty talks being held in Geneva and due to end on Thursday (14/8/25). Strange, then, that the industry announced it is abandoning a major recycling initiative in Europe while the talks are still ongoing.
Lobbyists are being paid to promote the virtues of chemical recycling (or advanced recycling, as they prefer to call it). After over 80 years of plastic production, the petrochemical industry has suddenly discovered new technologies to improve recycling rates and solve the plastics crisis.
With historical recycling rates at just 9% there is plenty of room for any initiative to improve the yield. Unfortunately, most of these new technologies are yet to be proven, and in fact, there is a growing list of projects that have been abandoned due to technical and financial challenges.
Over 1.6 million tonnes of potential chemical recycling capacity have been abandoned or closed in the past 12 months alone. This is in addition to at least 640,000 tonnes of mechanical recycling infrastructure that has been closed.
On August 7, Dow announced it was scrapping plans for a 120,000-tonne-per-year chemical recycling plant for mixed plastic waste at Bohlen, Germany. So, while the lobbyists are singing the praises of advanced recycling, the industry is quietly closing them down.
What is startling is the audacity of the timing of this announcement. It is almost as if the industry is quietly confident that the UN talks (now in their sixth round) will fail. The UN Treaty aims to tackle the plastics crisis at all levels, from production to end-of-life, but the industry is following the old tried and tested route of blaming the consumer for the inappropriate use and disposal of plastics. For the treaty to succeed, we need caps on production and commitment to recycling – both of which are unlikely to emerge from the UN’s sixth junket.