(GUF) EV BATTERY RECYCLING

Image inspiration - René Magritte - link

British government's have spent much of the last decade worrying about how quickly we can replace petrol and diesel cars with electric ones. A whole new different question is now beginning to emerge.

What happens when all those electric cars start dying? Not the cars particularly but the batteries. Millions of lithium-ion battery packs are steadily entering the British vehicle fleet and although most should remain useful for many years, they won't last forever. Some will fail, some will be damaged in accidents and others will simply reach the end of their useful automotive life. At that point Britain will begin receiving an entirely new waste stream containing lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, graphite, copper and aluminium and it's going to become a very large one indeed.

When does the wave hit?

For most of the 2020s, much of the battery material entering recycling plants is expected to come from manufacturing waste, damaged batteries, accident write-offs and the relatively small number of older electric vehicles reaching the end of their lives. That will begin to change around the start of the next decade. Research associated with the Faraday Institution has previously suggested that around 28,000 tonnes of EV batteries could require recycling in Britain by 2030.

More recent modelling from the Advanced Propulsion Centre suggests around 2031–32, batteries coming from retired electric vehicles are expected to overtake battery manufacturing scrap as the main source of material entering the recycling system. Then the numbers really start climbing. Earlier government planning estimates suggested Britain could eventually be dealing with something approaching 150,000 tonnes of EV batteries every year by the middle of the 2030s. The exact figure will inevitably move. Cars may last longer. Batteries may be repaired. Some vehicles will be exported. Some batteries may spend several more years operating as stationary energy storage before finally reaching recycling but the direction is difficult to argue with.

• The first substantial wave arrives around 2030.
• The much bigger one follows during the 2030s.

Can Britain recycle them?

Britain already has industrial lithium-ion battery recycling capability. Recyclus operates a lithium-ion recycling facility in Wolverhampton capable of dismantling and processing batteries into materials including copper, aluminium and black mass which is essentially the valuable powder left after battery cells have been shredded and separated containing materials including lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite.

The UK currently has around 17,000 tonnes per year of mechanical battery pre-treatment capacity according to recent Advanced Propulsion Centre estimates. By 2030 this could exceed 60,000 tonnes per year. If Britain expects around 28,000 tonnes of EV batteries requiring recycling around 2030, then theoretically the country may actually have enough capacity to dismantle and shred them but shredding is the easy part. Britain needs facilities capable of taking black mass and recovering the individual materials to a quality suitable for manufacturing new batteries otherwise we'll simply be dismantling the batteries here and exporting the valuable part overseas for someone else to refine allowing them to make the serious money from it.

Building the next stage

This is where companies such as Altilium become important. Its proposed ACT3 facility in Plymouth is intended to recover lithium, nickel materials and graphite from battery waste rather than simply producing black mass. The project received £18.5 million of government support in 2026 and is intended to begin commissioning towards the end of 2027. A much larger future facility proposed for Teesside could eventually process material equivalent to around 150,000 EV batteries every year. If projects like these succeed, Britain could begin creating something resembling a domestic battery materials industry and that changes the entire conversation because an old EV battery isn't simply waste. It's effectively a box containing concentrated raw materials that somebody has already gone to the trouble of mining, refining and transporting halfway around the world.

Who pays?

There will probably never be one standard price for recycling an electric vehicle battery. Some batteries will be valuable; some may be taken away at little or no cost whilst others could be extremely expensive to deal with. A good illustration comes from the emerging UK market for used EV batteries. An industry battery value index recently placed a first-generation Nissan Leaf battery with sufficient remaining condition for possible repair or reuse at around £550.00 positive value. The same type of battery in sufficiently poor condition that it was suitable only for recycling was valued at approximately minus £2,000 i.e. one battery might earn you money whilst the other might require somebody to pay £2k to get rid of it.

Many older electric vehicles use battery chemistries containing nickel and cobalt, both relatively valuable metals. Increasing numbers of newer EVs use lithium iron phosphate — LFP — batteries. LFP has several advantages. It's comparatively cheap, durable and avoids expensive nickel and cobalt. Unfortunately those same advantages make it considerably less attractive to recyclers.

European recycling markets have already seen substantial gate fees quoted for LFP batteries because the materials recovered from them may not cover the cost of processing. So one of the strange consequences of improving battery technology could be that batteries become cheaper to manufacture but more expensive to recycle.

Who actually gets the bill?

Under current UK rules, EV traction batteries are classed as industrial batteries. As such, battery producers have responsibilities for the collection, treatment and recycling of them and under certain circumstances must provide take back without charging the end user. That doesn't mean recycling is free. It simply means the cost moves somewhere else within the system. Manufacturers, compliance schemes, dismantlers, insurers and ultimately consumers may all contribute to paying for it.

There will also be batteries valuable enough for recyclers or second life businesses to pay for and there will be damaged batteries that nobody sensible wants anywhere near an ordinary vehicle. A crashed or thermally damaged lithium-ion battery can require specialist handling, packaging and transport because of the risk of fire and thermal runaway. At that point the value of the lithium inside becomes rather less exciting than the question of how you safely move several hundred kilograms of potentially unstable battery.

Britain's future mine

There is another reason why the idea of a domestic battery-material economy should not be dismissed too quickly. Britain may eventually be able to source some of the lithium itself. In Cornwall, Imerys British Lithium has identified a very large lithium-bearing granite resource near St Austell and demonstrated the production of battery grade lithium carbonate at pilot scale. The proposed commercial project was designed to produce around 20,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year, enough, according to UK government estimates, to support roughly 500,000 electric vehicles annually.

The complication is that the project is not currently moving towards production. In 2026 it was placed into care and maintenance while Imerys sought a long-term partner and reconsidered capital allocation. A separate company, Cornish Lithium, is continuing to develop its Trelavour project, which is targeting up to 10,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium hydroxide a year.

Potentially, Britain could eventually have both ends of the chain: lithium extracted in Cornwall at one end, and lithium recovered from dead EV batteries at the other. The interesting question is whether we can build the industrial middle before somebody else does it for us.

For decades Britain has worried about its dependence on imported raw materials. Lithium comes from overseas, as does nickel, cobalt and graphite supply is heavily concentrated internationally yet during the next twenty years we are going to quietly accumulate enormous quantities of all of them inside vehicles travelling around British roads and eventually those materials come back. The important question is whether Britain develops the infrastructure to keep them here because there are two possible futures.

In one, Britain collects old electric vehicle batteries, dismantles them, produces black mass and exports it for somebody else to refine. In the other, those batteries become the beginning of a domestic source of lithium, nickel, graphite, copper and other materials capable of feeding directly back into manufacturing. The first generation of electric cars was largely built using materials mined around the world. The next generation might increasingly be built from the remains of the first meaning that maybe Britain's largest future battery mine won't be underground at all, It'll be parked outside. More like this (Cornwall) - link - more like this (sodium-ion) - link - more like this (black mass) - link

(GUF) PLASTIC GOES HOME (2 OF 2)

Image inspiration - Man Ray - link

For decades we've treated waste plastic as a recycling industry problem. We collect it, sort it, wash it, shred it, separate it by polymer and colour and then attempt to persuade somebody to turn it back into plastic again. When that works, it can work extremely well. PET drinks bottles, HDPE bottles and sufficiently clean polyethylene and polypropylene all have established mechanical recycling routes in the UK.

The problem is everything else. Films, pouches, laminates, contaminated food packaging, mixed polymers and flexible plastics. Plastics containing additives, inks, labels and adhesives. The enormous, complicated collection of the plastics stream that we continue to manufacture in staggering quantities but are considerably less accomplished at recycling.

Baytown, Texas

Perhaps we've been asking the wrong industry to solve it. In Baytown, Texas, ExxonMobil is doing something fundamentally different. It's taking waste plastic and treating it not as rubbish, nor even as plastic but as hydrocarbon feedstock and that distinction will become enormously important.

Extended Advanced Recycling

ExxonMobil calls its technology 'Exxtend advanced recycling'. The underlying process is generally described as pyrolysis, where plastic is heated without oxygen and broken apart at molecular level; completely different from mechanical recycling where we're essentially trying to preserve the polymer. A polyethylene bottle is sorted, washed, shredded, melted and ultimately made into another polyethylene product.

Thermal decomposition asks what happens if we stop trying to preserve the plastic and instead recover the molecules from which it was made? Polyethylene and polypropylene are particularly interesting because chemically they consist overwhelmingly of carbon and hydrogen. In essence, they're long hydrocarbon chains that have been manufactured into useful solid materials; apply sufficient heat under controlled conditions and those long chains can be broken into smaller hydrocarbon molecules.

Exxon says its process converts waste plastic into raw materials chemically comparable with conventional feedstocks used within its enormous petrochemical manufacturing system. Those recovered materials can then be co-processed with fossil-derived feedstocks and used to manufacture chemicals, lubricants, fuels and new plastics and suddenly waste plastic starts looking different - no longer simply a troublesome material that the waste industry has failed to find a home for; it's carbon and hydrogen that somebody has already gone to considerable trouble and expense to extract, refine and manufacture, and perhaps throwing that carbon into an incinerator because we can't mechanically recycle the polymer is a wasteful conclusion to the story.

Baytown has moved beyond the familiar world of promising pilot plants and impressive artists' impressions. ExxonMobil's first commercial scale advanced recycling unit at its Baytown complex began operating in December 2022. A second followed and by February 2026, a third unit was operational. Exxon says Baytown can now process up to 250 million pounds of plastic waste each year (approximately 113,000 tonnes annually) and, importantly, there is some actual throughput behind the nameplate capacity. Exxon reported that by January 2026 the Baytown operation had processed more than 150 million pounds (around 68,000 tonnes) — cumulatively.

The plant can currently process around 113,000 tonnes annually but that doesn't mean it already does process 113,000 tonnes every year. This distinction matters enormously in advanced recycling, where proposed capacities have often proved considerably easier to announce than sustained industrial throughput has been to achieve, but Baytown has nevertheless crossed an important threshold. This isn't ExxonMobil saying it thinks it could recycle difficult plastic one day, it's already doing it.

Perhaps Baytown's greatest advantage, however, isn't the pyrolysis technology itself. It's Baytown, the facility. The advanced recycling operation sits within an existing integrated ExxonMobil petrochemical complex. The refining, chemical processing, laboratories, utilities, logistics, product manufacturing and markets already exist around it. Exxon explicitly argues that this integration allows waste derived material to be co-processed through existing equipment avoiding the need to create an entirely separate manufacturing system.

I believe the future of plastic recycling and more specifically thermal plastics recycling doesn't lie in building thousands of standalone pyrolysis plants and expecting each one to become a miniature petrochemical industry, but instead, attaching the recycling technology to the petrochemical industry that already exists.

Baytown doesn't mean we should start throwing every plastic we can find into a furnace. Exxon says Exxtend can accept feed mixes containing high proportions of HDPE, LDPE and polypropylene, together with some quantities of polystyrene, PVC and other polymers. Examples of material it has processed include artificial turf, lubricant and grease bottles and multilayer films and this is where the technology begins to fit surprisingly neatly alongside conventional recycling rather than replacing it.

Excluding PET

PET can certainly be broken down chemically or thermally but it isn't an especially attractive feedstock for this type of hydrocarbon cracking. Unlike polyethylene and polypropylene, PET contains significant oxygen within its molecular structure. More importantly, if you have a clean PET bottle, destroying the polymer doesn't make much sense as we already know how to recycle good quality PET back into rPET.

Deposit Return Schemes - where they fit

DRS increasingly allows countries to capture drinks bottles separately before they become badly contaminated with mixed household waste. Separate collection also preserves a relatively pure, valuable PET stream suitable for bottle to bottle recycling. TOMRA cites a European median collection rate of around 87% for PET beverage containers under deposit systems compared with around 50% in kerbside collection and notes the higher material purity obtained from separate DRS collection and DRS is expanding. Reloop expects more than 70 jurisdictions covering roughly 641 million people to have operational single-use beverage container deposit systems by the end of 2027.

At first sight, DRS has nothing whatsoever to do with a giant ExxonMobil plant in Texas, but perhaps it does. A mature plastics system might increasingly separate material according to its best recovery technology. Clean PET bottles remain PET bottles. Good quality separated PE and PP are mechanically recycled where that makes environmental and economic sense but contaminated films, multilayer packaging and difficult mixed polyolefins move somewhere else.They become feedstock for plants such as Baytown. In that scenario, DRS doesn't necessarily provide Exxon with cleaner PET. It helps by taking the PET away. We stop insisting that every plastic must travel through the same recycling system.

Mass Balancing

A piece of plastic entering Baytown cannot be followed through the complex and pointed at later as a particular new plastic container. The recycled hydrocarbon feedstocks are mixed with conventional fossil-derived feedstocks inside Exxon's manufacturing system. Exxon therefore uses mass-balance accounting. Essentially, if a qualifying amount of plastic waste enters the system, less recognised processing losses, an equivalent amount of qualifying output can be allocated as “certified circular” under the accounting system.

Exxon is actually quite explicit about the limitation: its certification is not a claim that a particular product physically contains a specified quantity of recycled molecules, nor does the certificate itself represent a greenhouse gas saving.

Critics will argue that customers may hear “recycled plastic” and imagine a physical closed loop that doesn't really exist at molecular level and that criticism deserves to be taken seriously but the accounting method doesn't necessarily invalidate the underlying industrial idea. Once recycled and fossil derived hydrocarbons are mixed inside a refinery and petrochemical complex, attempting to keep individual recycled carbon atoms in a separate pipe would defeat the benefit of using the existing infrastructure.

The more important questions are how much waste plastic actually enters? How much useful raw material comes out? What fossil feedstock does it displace? How much energy is consumed and what happens to the outputs?

Exxon says its process can convert nearly 90% of the used plastic it processes into useful raw materials - an impressive claim, but it shouldn't be confused with saying 90% becomes new plastic. Useful raw materials can ultimately contribute to fuels, lubricants, chemicals and plastics and that distinction will become increasingly important if advanced recycling grows.

Can Baytown become big enough to matter?

Global plastics production reached approximately 430.9 million tonnes in 2024. Polypropylene alone accounted for around 19%; LDPE and LLDPE another 13.9%; and HDPE and MDPE approximately 12.1%. In other words, polyethylene and polypropylene — the hydrocarbon rich polymers of particular interest to processes such as Baytown — represented roughly 45% of global plastics production.

Put Baytown beside those numbers and its present scale looks tiny. At around 113,000 tonnes of annual capacity, one current Baytown represents approximately 0.026% of annual global plastics production. If we absurdly asked today's Baytown to process the entire world's annual plastics production, we would need something approaching 3,800 of them.

Nobody sensible whould propose thermally decomposing every plastic. The question is what proportion of the enormous plastic stream cannot economically or technically be retained through better forms of mechanical or dedicated polymer recycling and then the arithmetic becomes much more interesting. Imagine future integrated petrochemical recycling units capable not of 100,000 tonnes annually, but 500,000 tonnes or one million tonnes. Fifty one-million-tonne facilities would process 50 million tonnes each year. One hundred would process 100 million tonnes. At that point we are no longer discussing a laboratory curiosity. We are discussing infrastructure capable of influencing global plastic flows and Exxon plainly believes scaling is possible.

In 2024 the company announced more than $200 million of additional investment at Baytown and Beaumont and set an ambition to reach one billion pounds roughly 454,000 tonnes of global advanced recycling capacity annually by 2027, with additional projects considered across North America, Europe and Asia. Its most recent Baytown update in February 2026 said the company was on track to reach approximately 450 million pounds of global annual capacity by the end of 2026. Those remain capacity figures and corporate plans, not proof that hundreds of millions of tonnes can eventually be processed economically. Feedstock supply, contamination, preprocessing, economics, energy consumption and regulation could all constrain expansion.

Exxon itself identifies collection, sorting, aggregation and preprocessing of suitable plastic waste as a significant part of the challenge but this is precisely why Baytown deserves watching.It's beginning to expose what the actual bottlenecks are.
The scale of the problem isn't waiting for us. The plastics problem is not becoming smaller while recycling technology catches up. The OECD projects that, without substantially stronger policies, global plastics use could rise from 460 million tonnes in 2019 to 1.231 billion tonnes in 2060.

Plastic waste could rise from 353 million tonnes to 1.014 billion tonnes annually. Even under that scenario, the OECD projects only around 17% of plastic waste being recycled in 2060.

We could become steadily better at collecting plastic while continuing to manufacture it considerably faster than we develop markets capable of consuming the resulting recyclate. Mechanical recycling, reuse, designing unnecessary plastic out of products, deposit systems, better sorting and producer responsibility must be part of the answer but none of those will make hundreds of millions of tonnes of difficult plastic disappear.

Plastic goes home

There is an irony here that will understandably make some environmentalists deeply uncomfortable. The companies that possess perhaps the greatest infrastructure, chemical expertise and potential capacity to process waste plastic on genuinely industrial scales are the same petrochemical companies responsible for manufacturing enormous quantities of virgin plastic but chemistry doesn't care about irony.

Plastic is fundamentally carbon, hydrogen and, depending upon the polymer, other elements arranged into extraordinarily useful molecules. The petrochemical industry understands those molecules because it created them and maybe we've spent too long asking how can the waste industry recycle all this plastic?

Baytown suggests - what if the petrochemical industry has to take some of it back? Not the clean PET bottle that can perfectly well become another PET bottle or the good quality polyethylene that already has a viable mechanical recycling market, but the difficult fraction. The films, the laminates, the contaminated polyolefins, the material currently being burned because nobody can find anything better to do with it. Maybe its next destination should not be an incinerator; maybe it should go back into the chemical industry as raw material.

Baytown is nowhere near large enough to solve the global plastics problem today. Exxon has certainly not demonstrated that thermal decomposition can economically absorb hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic and serious questions remain around energy, emissions, yield, mass balance and feedstock preparation but Baytown may be demonstrating something more important than a finished solution. Protect the polymers worth preserving - mechanically recycle what can genuinely be mechanically recycled. Use DRS and better collection to produce cleaner, more valuable material streams and for some of what remains, stop thinking of it as failed plastic - think of it as carbon, because ultimately the only industry operating on anything approaching the scale of global plastics production may be the industry that made the plastic in the first place.

Perhaps, after a remarkably long journey through our homes, businesses, bins and recycling plants, some of our plastic simply needs to go home. Baytown - link - Tomra - link - more like this (chemical recycling) - link - more like this (Texas) - link

(GUF) THE PROBLEM RECYCLED PLASTIC CAN'T ESCAPE (1 OF 2)

Image inspiration - René Magritte - link

In November 2022, Shell began producing polyethylene at its enormous new Shell Polymers Monaca complex in Pennsylvania, right in the heart of America's shale gas region. The principle is simple: the plant takes ethane extracted from natural gas and turns it into polyethylene, one of the world's most widely used plastics, found in films, flexible packaging, bottles, containers and countless everyday products.

Shell Polymers Monaca has a designed production capacity of around 1.6 million tonnes of polyethylene every year. That's approximately 4,400 tonnes every day, 183 tonnes every hour, or around three tonnes of new polyethylene every single minute. Minute after minute. Day after day.

Shell deliberately built the plant close to both its raw material and its customers. When production began, the company said approximately 70% of the US polyethylene market was within a 700 mile radius of the site. It represented a huge industrial bet on the future of plastic.

Less than four years after production began, however, Shell is exploring strategic options for its US chemicals business, including potential sales and partnerships. According to recent reports, ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell are among companies that have shown interest, alongside Apollo Global Management and the chemicals arm of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. Non-binding offers have reportedly been submitted, although no final deal has been agreed.

So, to sum up, Shell, one of the world's largest energy companies, built one of America's newest and biggest polyethylene complexes, began making plastic there in late 2022 and is already considering reducing its exposure to it. At first glance, you could conclude that the age of virgin plastic is beginning to draw to a close. Unfortunately, you'd be very, very wrong.

The explanation is considerably less comforting for anybody involved in recycling. The global petrochemical industry has become extremely good at manufacturing plastic. Huge amounts of new production capacity have been added, particularly across China, the Middle East and the United States. Production capability has grown much faster than demand, putting pressure on margins across the chemicals industry. Simply put: too much capacity - too much product and not enough customers prepared to pay the prices producers would like.

Recycling Has a Virgin Plastic Problem

In Britain and Europe we're expending enormous political, industrial and consumer effort trying to increase plastics recycling. We redesign packaging, introduce Extended Producer Responsibility, change collection systems, build sorting plants and specify recycled content. We develop chemical recycling technologies and encourage consumers to separate ever more complicated materials.

There is however, one rather inconvenient economic fact hiding behind all of it. Recycled polymer does not exist inside its own protected economy. It has to compete, and one of the things it competes against is new plastic. New plastic being produced in enormous petrochemical complexes capable of operating continuously, using established technology, huge supply chains and relatively cheap fossil feedstocks.

Globally we've traditionally asked how we can recycle more plastic but perhaps we should increasingly be asking who's going to buy all the recycled plastic once we've made it because those are not the same problem. Indeed, I believe that we may have spent too much of the last decade concentrating on creating supply while assuming that the market will somehow create the demand when there's absolutely no guarantee that it will.

Petrochemicals Aren't Going Away

The International Energy Agency expects the production of polymers and synthetic fibres to require the equivalent of around 18.4 million barrels of oil every day by 2030. That's more than one barrel in every six consumed globally. As oil demand for road transport eventually weakens, petrochemicals are expected to become an increasingly important source of demand for the oil and gas industry which means the companies supplying virgin plastic aren't preparing to leave the market - quite the opposite.

So perhaps Shell Monaca offers us a useful warning. Not that virgin plastic is disappearing, but that virgin plastic production has become so enormous, efficient and globally competitive that even one of the world's newest and most valuable polyethylene facilities can find itself operating in a brutally oversupplied market and recycled plastic has to enter that same market.

This is why I increasingly think the great plastics debate has moved beyond collection rates. We can perfect household collections. We can perfect sorting, washing and polymer identification. We can even perfect the recycling technology itself but if the resulting material cannot compete commercially with another tonne of virgin polymer rolling out of a petrochemical complex somewhere in Pennsylvania, Texas, Saudi Arabia or China, we haven't created a circular economy, we've basically created a very sophisticated way of manufacturing something nobody is obliged to buy.

In my opinion, we're spending extraordinary amounts of money perfecting the collection and recycling of yesterday's plastic while the petrochemical industry quietly manufactures tomorrow's and we need to start being more realistic.

Perhaps closed loop isn't always the right loop. Plastic may ultimately prove more valuable as a source of recovered carbon than as a source of recycled plastic and if that's true, the plastics recycling industry may eventually have to ask if we're trying to save the plastic when what we should really be saving is the carbon?

Perhaps the Waste Industry Should Know Where to Stop

There may be another assumption worth challenging. Why should the waste industry itself be trying to turn plastic back into plastic? Maybe our role could finish much earlier. We're exceptionally good at collecting materials, identifying them, separating them, sorting them, consolidating them and moving enormous quantities efficiently and that may be exactly where our job should end?

Waste plastic could be collected, sorted and prepared into consistent feedstocks by the waste and recycling industry and then handed back to the industry that understands hydrocarbons rather better than we ever will: the petrochemical industry. Let them extract the carbon. Let them turn it into chemical feedstocks. Let them decide whether that carbon becomes polymers, lubricants, chemicals or something we haven't yet considered.

Legally, that material may still be waste when it changes hands but commercially something rather important would have happened. The waste industry would stop trying to become a petrochemical industry and instead, it would become its raw-material supplier. Perhaps that is the division of labour we've been missing? More like this (Shell) - link - note like this (Pennsylvania) - link - more like this (China) - link

(GUF) ANOTHER WASTE POLICY DELAY

Image inspiration - Salvador Dalí - link

There's a point at which another delayed environmental deadline stops looking like an unfortunate coincidence and starts looking like a pattern. Waste incineration was supposed to enter the UK Emissions Trading Scheme in 2028 - now, it won't. Flexible plastics were supposed to be collected under Simpler Recycling from 2027 - now, they won't be.

Digital Waste Tracking is now almost upon us and very few seem to be asking whether the waste industry is ready. Some undoubtedly are; the major national operators have the money, people and sophisticated software systems to prepare for regulatory change, but Britain’s waste industry isn't just the national operators. It consists of hundreds of smaller waste companies, skip businesses, specialist collectors, transfer stations, recyclers and independent operators. How many of those businesses genuinely understand what Digital Waste Tracking is going to require of them? How many have compatible systems? How many have trained their staff? How many are still assuming that somebody will eventually tell them what to do and what happens if a significant part of the industry simply isn't ready?

Then there's the Deposit Return Scheme. In October 2027 Britain intends to fundamentally change the way billions of drinks containers are collected. We will create return points, reverse vending infrastructure, collection networks, counting centres, sorting systems, financial reconciliation mechanisms and an entirely new flow of material running alongside the waste and recycling infrastructure we already have. Nice idea, but is it ready?

Do we have the infrastructure, the vehicles and the counting capacity, or more realistically, can it be purchased, tested and made ready in one year? Do we know what the logistics will actually cost and do the economics work and perhaps most importantly, are we asking these questions early enough or, typical of the UK, will we discover the answers when implementation is already bearing down upon us because we seem to have been here before.

For years Britain has talked enthusiastically about recycling flexible plastics. Then, as the deadline approached, reality intervened. Collecting something is relatively easy. Sorting it economically is harder. Recycling it into something somebody actually wants to buy is harder still so the deadline moved three years.

Now ETS has moved too. Perhaps these are sensible decisions. There's nothing clever about implementing a bad policy on time simply because somebody once typed a date into a consultation document but surely we need to question why we repeatedly get so close to implementation before discovering problems that the people actually working with waste could have described years earlier? Maybe the problem in Britain isn't ambition, it's the distance between the people designing waste policy and the people expected to deliver it - waste policy can look beautifully simple from Whitehall.

Material goes into container - vehicle collects it - facility sorts it - reprocessor recycles it. Carbon emissions fall. Recycling rates rise. A PowerPoint with colourful diagram is produced and everybody goes home. The real world, however, is rather less obedient.

There are drivers, vehicles, depots, permits, contamination, planning applications, more frequent unplanned fires, insurance, commodity markets, volatile recyclate prices, rejected loads, staff shortages, software that doesn't talk to other software and customers who ultimately have to pay for the whole thing.

The strangest example may actually be Digital Waste Tracking.

We are about to build a system designed to give government vastly better information about what waste Britain produces, where it moves and what ultimately happens to it but wouldn't having that information before redesigning enormous parts of Britain's waste system have been rather useful or is that too logical?

We're staggering but simultaneously introducing EPR, Simpler Recycling, Digital Waste Tracking and Deposit Return while attempting to decarbonise waste treatment and reshape the economics of packaging which is an extraordinary amount of structural change even for a government that actually understands the industry intimately. Does this one 🤔?

I assume that someone has asked what happens when EPR interacts with DRS; DRS alters the material entering kerbside recycling; Simpler Recycling changes collection patterns; DWT records those movements and eventually ETS changes the economics of whatever remains? Who is stress testing the combined system and who's actually responsible for making sure all these separate policies work together, and who, ultimately, carries the risk if the assumptions are wrong? That'll be us then, the waste management industry!

Britain needs better recycling. We need better data. We need producers to take greater responsibility for what they place onto the market. We need to reduce fossil carbon in residual waste, but environmental ambition without practical deliverability isn't environmental policy - Ipit's a timetable and Britain's waste policy timetable is beginning to acquire rather a lot of crossings out. More like this (legislation) - link - more like this (questioning policy) - link - more like this (waste tracking) - link

(GUF) WHO ARE WE KIDDING?

Image inspiration (Frida Kahlo) - link

WHO ARE WE KIDDING?

In Britain and Europe we're spending enormous political, industrial and consumer effort trying to squeeze another few percentage points out of plastics recycling: EPR fees, Simpler Recycling, improved collections, packaging redesign, recycled content requirements, sorting technology, consumer campaigns and potentially chemical recycling.

Meanwhile, globally, petrochemical companies are commissioning millions upon millions of tonnes of new virgin polymer capacity.

Perhaps the uncomfortable question for the waste industry is simply; are we too hung up on plastic? We collect it, sort it, bale it and talk endlessly about improving its recyclability, but how much influence do we have over the material? We don't design it, manufacture it or determine how much virgin polymer enters the market and frankly, we're not particularly good at recycling much of it either.

Increasingly, the clever technology - polymer design, advanced reprocessing, depolymerisation, pyrolysis and petrochemical conversion all belong to industries upstream of ours.

Perhaps the waste industry needs to ask whether it should continue trying to solve a problem largely created and controlled elsewhere or concentrate more of its attention on the things it can influence and already does well and stop judging its entire performance through the prism of plastic.

Give us aluminium and we'll recover it. Give us steel and we'll separate it. Give us cardboard and we'll turn it back into fibre. Give us properly segregated container glass and we'll return it to the furnace.

Are we designing recycling policy without sufficiently considering the industrial economics of the material we're trying to replace? More like this (plastic) - link - more like this (Simpler Recycling) - link

(GUF) DRS - WHERE TO PUT THE MACHINES

Image inspiration (Man Ray) - link

Britain's Deposit Return Scheme hasn't even started yet, but there may already be a good reason to ask whether we're going to be putting the machines in the right places.

The UK scheme begins in October 2027. The principle is simple: buy a drink in an eligible plastic bottle or metal can, pay a deposit, return the empty container and get your money back. There's a great deal to like about it. Separately collecting PET bottles and aluminium cans should produce cleaner, higher-quality material, particularly for manufacturers wanting recycled material suitable for making new bottles.

Whether DRS is a good idea isn't really my question, it's where we expect people to return the containers. The British model is predominantly retailer based. Supermarkets, grocery stores, convenience stores and newsagents selling drinks within the scheme will generally have to provide return points unless exempt. Smaller urban shops below 100 square metres are already exempt, and there is industry speculation – although not confirmed Government policy – that the practical threshold could eventually rise further. If that happened, Britain's DRS could effectively become largely a supermarket return scheme and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Ireland demonstrates why. Lidl was an early adopter of its Deposit Return Scheme and subsequently installed two reverse vending machines at every store in the Republic. Within seven months of the national scheme beginning, Lidl had processed 100 million bottles and cans – almost one fifth of all containers returned nationally at the time. Ireland passed one billion returned drinks containers in February 2025, with the billionth returned at a Lidl store in Dublin. The supermarket model clearly works.

There are also sound commercial reasons for retailers to want this material. Lidl's parent, the Schwarz Group, which also owns environmental business PreZero, has increasingly developed circular material systems. A PET bottle returned cleanly through a reverse vending machine isn't simply rubbish somebody has handed back. Collect enough of them and you have a valuable industrial raw material - but something interesting is happening rather further away.

The experiment in Vietnam

Coca-Cola Vietnam has been experimenting with a broader collection network using reverse vending machines and community collection points. One particularly interesting result has come from Ho Chi Minh City's Metro system. After installing reverse vending machines at four Metro stations, Coca-Cola reportedly found collection volumes significantly higher than those achieved elsewhere. That doesn't prove Britain's approach is wrong. But it poses an interesting question about logistics.

The traditional retail model effectively asks: Where did you buy your drink? The Metro model asks: Where will you be when you've finished it?

And that distinction could matter enormously.

Someone buying a bottle of water at lunchtime probably has little intention of carrying the empty bottle back to a supermarket that evening. They may, however, walk through a railway station on their way home. Put the machine there and returning the bottle no longer requires a special journey. It becomes part of a journey they were making anyway and suddenly the potential network looks rather different: railway and underground stations, universities, shopping centres, airports, stadiums, large workplaces and service stations.

Perhaps the most logical measurement when deciding where to install a reverse vending machine isn't the number of square metres inside the building. It's the number of people walking past the machine?

None of this means supermarkets disappear. Ireland proves they can process enormous quantities of material. They have space, staff, established logistics and customers who regularly return but perhaps they should be only part of the network. Britain's regulations already allow organisations outside conventional grocery retail – including schools, gyms, sports centres and community organisations to establish voluntary return points. That means the network could eventually evolve towards the places where people actually return the most containers and that's what makes the Vietnamese experiment interesting.

Coca-Cola hasn't invented a revolutionary recycling technology. What's changing is the thinking about where to put the machine. There's an important difference between designing a recycling system around the organisations selling the product and designing one around the behaviour of the person eventually disposing of the packaging. The first is administratively logical; the second might simply be more convenient and convenience matters as Britain is not starting from zero. Before DRS, around 76% of PET drinks bottles and 71% of aluminium and steel drinks cans were already being collected for recycling. The DRS target is 90%.

With roughly 12 billion PET bottles and 13 billion cans placed on the market annually, reaching 90% means capturing, very approximately, another four billion containers a year that currently escape recycling which raises perhaps the most important question - where are those missing containers?

Britain still has more than a year before DRS begins. Nobody yet knows exactly how consumers will behave or which return points will handle the greatest volumes.
Perhaps Ireland and Vietnam are showing us two halves of the answer.

Supermarkets demonstrate that reverse vending can work at enormous scale. Vietnam suggests that convenience and footfall may determine where it works best.

The deposit may be exactly the right idea – the machine may simply be in the wrong place and that leaves one question worth asking before Britain installs thousands of them: Are we designing DRS around where people buy their drinks or where they actually finish them? More like this (Deposit Return Schemes) - link - more like this (Vietnam) - link - more like this (Coco-Cola) - link - more like this (Metro) - link

(GUF) CHINA OPENS TO RECYCLED PLASTIC (AGAIN)

Image inspiration - Leonora Carrington - link

In 2017 China changed the global recycling industry almost overnight. Its National Sword policy effectively closed the country's doors to imported plastic waste after years of accepting enormous quantities from Europe, Britain, the United States and elsewhere. At the time, there was considerable anger and consternation throughout the Western waste and recycling industry. Suddenly there was nowhere for millions of tonnes of supposedly recyclable plastic to go.

China had a valid point. For years, wealthy countries had been shipping enormous quantities of poorly sorted, contaminated and often unrecyclable plastic and other crap halfway around the world and happily recording it as recycling. China was left to separate the useful material from everybody else's rubbish and deal with the environmental consequences.

National Sword essentially said enough but nine years later something interesting is happening. Under China's new 15th five year Circular Economy Development Plan, Beijing intends to expand the import and use of high-quality recycled raw materials from overseas. China wants recycled plastic back but there's an important distinction. China is not reopening its borders to the contaminated plastic waste it rejected in 2017. Imported solid waste remains prohibited. What China increasingly wants is plastic that has already been properly sorted, processed and transformed into a consistent secondary raw material suitable for manufacturing. Existing Chinese standards already recognise products such as recycled plastic pellets and PET flakes, while the new plan proposes widening the range of qualifying recycled materials.

In essence, China still doesn't want our rubbish. It may increasingly want to buy the useful material we manufacture from it and the reason why is the most interesting part of the story. National Sword successfully reduced the environmental problems associated with importing other countries' waste but it couldn't eliminate China's enormous demand for plastic. Without imported recycled feedstock and without sufficiently strong policies requiring manufacturers to use recycled material, the market did something remarkably predictable - it turned to virgin plastic.

China's imports of primary plastic increased from around 29.7 million tonnes in 2017 to 40.9 million tonnes in 2020. China then dramatically expanded its own petrochemical industry with self sufficiency in synthetic resins reportedly reaching around 90% by 2024. In effect, China stopped importing much of the world's discarded plastic but continued consuming mountains of plastic. Increasingly, it simply made virgin material itself.

That in itself is not necessarily evidence that National Sword was wrong. It demonstrates something more important. Restricting the supply of recycled material does not automatically create a circular economy. There also has to be demand for recycled material, and China appears to have learned that lesson.

Its latest circular economy plans include an ambition to produce more than 19.5 million tonnes of recycled plastic annually by 2030 while improving access to high-quality overseas recycled feedstock. China is also the world's largest manufacturer and exporter of plastic goods, increasingly selling into markets where recycled-content requirements are becoming more demanding.

What's happening in China isn't simply environmental policy, it's industrial policy, resource security and economics, and this is where the move becomes particularly relevant for Europe. While China is considering how to make it easier for high quality recycled materials to enter the country, the European Union is moving in almost the opposite direction. From November 2026, the EU will prohibit exports of plastic waste to non-OECD countries.

I can imagine policymakers in Brussels glancing towards Beijing and wondering whether they have missed something?

The two policies are not directly contradictory. Europe wants to stop environmental problems being exported and encourage more plastic to be recycled within Europe. China still doesn't want imported waste either, but the contrast raises a question.

China has spent nine years discovering that restricting the movement of recyclable plastic without simultaneously creating sufficient demand for recycled material can strengthen the position of virgin plastic. Is Europe in danger of conducting a similar experiment?

Britain is no longer part of the European Union and is therefore not directly subject to its new waste shipment regulation, but Britain nevertheless remains subject to strict international and domestic controls governing waste exports and nobody should seriously advocate returning to the days of shipping contaminated mixed-plastic bales around the world and calling it recycling but if British waste plastic can be sorted, washed and processed into a consistent, specification-grade secondary raw material that a manufacturer in China genuinely wants to purchase, that is a very different proposition.

This, in my opinion, also exposes a weakness in the way we sometimes think about recycling in Britain. For years, enormous emphasis has been placed on collection. We measure recycling rates, introduce additional collection requirements, tell households which bin to use and congratulate ourselves when another material is added to the recycling system but collecting something doesn't create a circular economy. Somebody ultimately has to want the material that comes out the other end.

Our recent experience with flexible plastics demonstrates exactly that problem. Collecting increasingly complicated mixtures of polymers is relatively easy compared with consistently turning them into secondary materials capable of competing technically and economically with virgin polymer and maybe China's experience provides a useful lesson.

In 2017 China was entirely justified in telling the world that it would no longer be its dumping ground. Nine years later it appears equally willing to recognise that refusing rubbish and importing valuable recycled resources are not the same thing.

There's no shame in changing policy when the evidence changes. If anything, China's willingness to learn, adapt and amend its approach deserves some credit. The more uncomfortable question may be whether Britain and Europe are prepared to learn from China's experiment too.

Perhaps we should spend slightly less time asking how much plastic we collect for recycling and rather more time asking a much harder question of after we've collected it, have we actually made something anybody wants to buy? More like this (China) - link - more like this (recycled plastic) - link - more like this (rubbish) - link

(GUF) TRAY, TRAY AND TRAY AGAIN

Image inspiration - Man Ray - link

Emirates recently announced that it had recycled more than 88 tonnes of redundant plastic meal trays, bowls and dishes from its Economy Class service over the past year. It's an impressive number, but perhaps the more interesting story isn't the airline, it's the company taking the old trays away and bringing them back.

Belgian headquartered deSter designs and manufactures food service products for more than 80 airlines worldwide. Increasingly, however, it isn't simply designing the product, it's trying to design what happens to it at the end of its useful life and that's where this becomes interesting from a waste management perspective.

The elephant in the departure lounge

Before getting too enthusiastic, there's an obvious point to acknowledge. Aviation is hardly an environmental poster child. Commercial aircraft consume enormous quantities of fuel, generate significant greenhouse gas emissions and aviation remains one of the more difficult sectors of the global economy to decarbonise. Recycling a meal tray doesn't cancel any of that out, nor should an airline be considered environmentally sustainable simply because somebody has found a better way of dealing with its crockery but that would be missing the point.

An industry's wider environmental impact isn't an argument for ignoring the impacts it can reduce. If humans are going to continue flying and every indication suggests that we are – repeatedly reusing products and recovering their constituent materials at end-of-life is surely preferable to continually manufacturing replacements from virgin resources.

Aviation's environmental footprint is an argument for doing more, not an argument for dismissing the things it gets right and in this particular case, something is being done exceptionally well.

Recycling isn't necessarily circular

Industry has become very comfortable, perhaps even complacent with the idea of recycling. Put something in the correct container, send it to a recycling facility and receive a report stating that it's been recycled - job done - except, of course, that isn't necessarily a circular economy.

Successful recycling ultimately requires three things: a recoverable and sufficiently consistent material, viable reprocessing and somebody willing to buy and use the resulting secondary raw material.

deSter's approach attempts to connect all three. Its reusable airline serviceware can reportedly withstand at least 150 uses and then only when an item becomes damaged or otherwise unserviceable does the recycling stage begin. The redundant products are collected, washed and inspected before being ground into material that can then be incorporated into new serviceware with those replacement products being supplied back to the airline - tray becomes tray - bowl becomes bowl.

The customer consuming the product effectively becomes the supplier of raw material for its replacement which is a considerably more interesting proposition than simply saying something is recyclable and it's harder than it sounds because these aren't old plastic trays being turned into traffic cones or park benches, they're being returned to food contact applications and that requires considerably greater control over material provenance, contamination, traceability and processing.

deSter began developing its aviation closed-loop system around 2018 and in 2021 announced approval from the European Food Safety Authority for its food-contact closed-loop recycling process. Its reusable product range includes polypropylene (PP), bio-PP and PET, although the precise polymer used varies between individual products and airline programmes. Replacement products typically contain around 25% recycled material, meaning virgin polymer is still required which is worth acknowledging as this isn't an infinitely self-sustaining loop in which yesterday's tray becomes 100% of tomorrow's tray.

Material performance, food-contact requirements and manufacturing specifications impose limitations - the important development is that recovered material is being deliberately specified as feedstock for replacement products.

Emirates provides an excellent demonstration of scale. Its closed loop programme, launched in 2023 and now reportedly recovers damaged Economy Class trays, casseroles, snack dishes and bowls for processing in Dubai. More than 88,000 kilograms were repurposed during the reported year, with new products containing up to 25% recycled material, but Emirates is only part of the story; KLM was working with deSter on closed-loop airline catering products as far back as 2019; Cathay Pacific has reported returning more than 47,000 damaged or substandard Economy Class trays, which were broken down, processed and injection-moulded into new trays containing approximately 25% recycled material; Etihad introduced a reusable Economy Class dining system designed so that trays, dishes, bowls, lids and platters can eventually be recovered, ground and incorporated into replacement products; TAP Air Portugal introduced similar reusable closed-loop tableware on long-haul Economy services, reportedly on a cost-neutral basis.

deSter's sustainability reporting has identified five airlines across three continents participating in its established closed-loop programmes: Emirates, Etihad, KLM, Cathay Pacific and TAP Air Portugal, others are beginning to design products around similar principles.

Keeping the loop local

Sending redundant plastic thousands of miles around the world simply to recycle it would rather undermine the exercise; deSter therefore operates manufacturing and processing infrastructure across several regions. Its European closed loop activity has centred on its manufacturing operation in Hoogstraten, Belgium, while Asian material can be handled through its operation in Prachinburi, Thailand. For Emirates, redundant serviceware is processed locally in Dubai, with deSter operating from the Jebel Ali area.

This geographical element matters. Circularity isn't simply about where a material eventually ends up. Transport, handling and processing are part of its environmental footprint too. A genuinely effective loop should therefore be as short geographically as it is circular materially.

Five airlines down. Quite a few to go.

And this is where praise needs to turn into a question. deSter says it supplies more than 80 airlines worldwide but its published sustainability reporting identifies only five airline partners operating established closed loop recycling programmes. Meanwhile, IATA's global statistical collection draws information from more than 1,300 airlines.

Those figures aren't directly comparable; deSter is only one supplier and airlines vary enormously in size and operation so it would be misleading of me to suggest that only a tiny percentage of aviation uses closed loop serviceware but they do illustrate the size of the opportunity because deSter and its airline partners have already answered several important questions.

Why isn't it being done much more widely?

Perhaps the bin is where we've been going wrong. Throughout all of my time in the industry, waste management has concentrated on what happens after somebody decides something is waste. We manufacture a product, sell it, use it and eventually throw it away and only then do we ask - what can we do with this?

Closed-loop thinking reverses that sequence. Before manufacturing the product, ask: what will happen when the customer has finished with it? Even better - how do we make sure we get the material back?

Airlines actually provide an unusually good environment in which to answer these questions.

Unlike takeaway packaging disappearing into millions of homes and workplaces, airline serviceware operates within a relatively controlled system. The airline specifies it initially, the catering operation supplies it, the passenger uses it, cabin crew collect it and then the catering operation receives it back. The material never completely escapes the supply chain and once you'e recognised that, designing a recovery loop becomes considerably more achievable.

The challenge now is to make the exception considerably less exceptional because perhaps the best recycling system isn't the one that finds somewhere for our waste to go, it's the one that already knows how it's coming back. deSter - link - more like this (aviation) - link - more like this (Emirates) - link - more like this (sustainable aviation) - link - more like this (KLM) - link - more like this (plastic recycling) - link

(GUF) COMPOSTING HUMANS

Image inspiration - René Magritte - link

Earth Funeral has recently opened what it describes as the first human composting facility on the US East Coast. Located in Maryland, the facility uses a process known rather more elegantly as Natural Organic Reduction (NOR), in which human remains are placed inside individual vessels with organic bulking materials and subjected to controlled aerobic decomposition.

Temperature, moisture, oxygen and airflow are managed to encourage microbial activity in much the same way as other controlled composting processes. Maryland regulations require the material within the vessel to reach at least 55°C for 72 consecutive hours as part of the pathogen reduction process with 'transformation' taking up to 45 days. There are currently fewer vessels installed but the facility is ultimately designed to accommodate 126, with a projected capacity of around 2,000 people each year.

Strange though the concept may initially sound, there's a serious environmental argument behind it. Traditional burial requires land and can involve coffins, embalming chemicals and maintained cemetery infrastructure. Cremation avoids many of those issues but requires considerable energy and produces carbon emissions. Natural Organic Reduction offers another option: controlled biological decomposition returning the organic material to soil.

It's easy to cringe at the idea but strip away our cultural relationship with death and the underlying biological principle is hardly revolutionary. Human beings are organic matter and decomposition happens eventually regardless of what funeral arrangements we make. NOR simply controls and accelerates that process.

Environmental claims do, however, deserve scrutiny. Earth describes its process as having zero net CO₂ emissions, largely because its vessels operate using renewable electricity and because carbon released through decomposition is regarded as part of the short-term biogenic carbon cycle rather than additional fossil carbon. That doesn't mean the process produces no emissions. Earth's own scientific information acknowledges that approximately 30–40% of the organic carbon in the body is converted to carbon dioxide through microbial respiration during decomposition.

An independent comparative life cycle assessment undertaken for Dutch funeral organisation DELA estimated the climate impact of human composting at approximately 47 kg CO₂e per person which placed it almost alongside electric cremation at 45 kg CO₂e and natural burial at 40 kg CO₂e, although substantially below gas cremation at 181 kg CO₂e. NOR may therefore represent a comparatively low-carbon option, but perhaps not quite the environmental miracle some headlines suggest. Maryland has specifically created a regulatory framework for Natural Organic Reduction as a method for the final disposition of human remains. Earth isn't operating a conventional waste management or composting facility and the deceased aren't classified as waste. Operationally, however, things begin to look remarkably familiar to anyone who has spent time around biological waste treatment facilities.

There are acceptance criteria, prohibited inputs, controlled treatment vessels, organic bulking agents, defined residence periods, temperature requirements, moisture controls, pathogen controls, odour controls, record keeping and restrictions governing the resulting material. The facility must even operate under a formal Reduction Facility Operations Plan covering the movement of material through receipt, active reduction, curing and storage.

Maryland regulations prohibit NOR where somebody is known or reasonably suspected to have certain conditions, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or another prion disease, Ebola or tuberculosis. Certain radioactive treatments can also prevent acceptance. Battery-powered implanted devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators must be removed, with operators required to check remains using a hand magnet or metal-detection equipment.

Legally, it isn't waste treatment. Operationally, however, an awful lot of it would be instantly recognisable to somebody auditing a biological treatment facility. Once the process has been successfully completed, the legal status changes. What entered the vessel as human remains emerges as what Maryland legislation describes as soil remains. Earth says each person produces approximately 113 kg of soil like material. For an individual family this creates a rather beautiful proposition - take the soil home, plant a tree, establish a memorial garden, scatter it somewhere meaningful (with the landowner's permission) and the person quite literally contributes to new life.

However, multiply the numbers - at Earth's projected Maryland capacity, 2,000 people × 113 kg produces approximately 226 tonnes of material every year and the question inevitably arises: where does it all go?

Maryland places significant restrictions on NOR soil. It cannot be sold or resold, incorporated into commercial compost, used to grow food intended for humans or livestock or simply placed on somebody else's land without permission. Perfectly sensible safeguards but those restrictions also remove several of the obvious large-scale markets normally available to recovered organic material.

Earth allows families to take soil remains and says material families don't want can be donated for uses including tree planting, habitat restoration and conservation projects. At current volumes that may provide an entirely satisfactory solution but what happens if human composting succeeds and scales up? One facility producing around 226 tonnes annually may be manageable - ten facilities could produce more than 2,000 tonnes. If 100,000 people eventually chose NOR nationally, the process could potentially create around 11,300 tonnes of material every year and at that point, planting a memorial rose stops being an end-market strategy and this is where human composting encounters exactly the same fundamental challenge conventional recycling has faced for decades.

Producing a recoverable material does not automatically create a circular economy. For a circular system to work, somebody ultimately has to have a genuine, sustainable and lawful use for what comes out of the other end. Human composting therefore presents an unusual paradox. Its environmental proposition is partly based upon producing useful soil rather than consuming energy through cremation or occupying land through conventional burial. But the more successful the process becomes, the more soil it produces and the more important reliable outlets for that soil become. A few kilograms kept by a grieving family has enormous sentimental value. Hundreds or thousands of tonnes require an end market.

None of this means human composting is a bad idea — quite the opposite. The technology is fascinating, the regulatory framework developing around it is surprisingly sophisticated and there is a perfectly credible argument that controlled biological decomposition could become another legitimate alternative to burial and cremation.

A facility capable of treating 2,000 people annually has throughput, capacity, emissions, storage requirements, process controls and outputs. Those things don't disappear because the material entering the vessel has a name rather than a waste code. Perhaps Natural Organic Reduction will prove to be one of the more environmentally sustainable ways of dealing with the unavoidable reality of death but sustainability cannot be judged solely by what happens to the person entering the vessel. We also have to ask what happens to everything leaving it. Earth Funeral - link - More like this (composting) - link - more like this (Maryland) - link

(GUF) ABU DHABI EXPANDS NASEEJ

Image inspiration René Magritte - link

The UAE discards around 220,000 tonnes of textiles every year and an estimated 88% currently goes to landfill. A new national initiative intends to change that, but its success may ultimately depend upon something considerably harder to engineer than a recycling plant: good old human behaviour.

Abu Dhabi has announced another significant expansion of Naseej, the UAE’s National Initiative for Textile Circularity, with 14 new strategic agreements taking its network to more than 35 organisations.

On the face of it, this could easily become another familiar sustainability story: agreements are signed, photographs are taken and an impressive collection of corporate logos appears beneath a circular-economy banner. But Naseej deserves a closer look.

Naseej estimates that around 500 million textile pieces are consumed annually in the UAE. Against that scale of consumption, the challenge is not simply to collect more discarded clothing, but to create the infrastructure, markets and consumer appetite; capable of keeping those materials in circulation. The UAE isn't fine tuning an established circular textile economy; it is attempting to build one.

Europe is tackling much the same problem through increasingly strong regulation. Under legislation stemming from its circular-economy strategy, separate textile collection is mandatory across EU Member States and Extended Producer Responsibility will increasingly make producers responsible for financing collection, sorting, reuse and recycling. Alongside this sit ecodesign requirements, greater product information, Digital Product Passports and measures addressing textile waste and unsold goods.

Europe is, in effect, attempting to regulate circularity into existence whereas the UAE appears, at least initially, to be approaching the problem differently. Rather than beginning with a long list of obligations, Naseej is assembling the organisations required to make the system work, with it's partners spanning government, retail, property, healthcare, logistics, technology, recycling, academia and the charitable sector.

That matters because textile circularity requires considerably more than somewhere to put unwanted clothes. It requires collection, sorting, reuse markets, recycling technology, manufacturers prepared to use recovered fibres and ultimately consumers willing to buy the resulting products. Naseej therefore poses the question: can you build a circular economy before you regulate one?

Collecting textiles does not automatically make them circular. A discarded shirt collected in Abu Dhabi and subsequently exported for reuse may represent a better outcome than landfill but it hasn't necessarily created a UAE circular textile economy.

Similarly, turning clothing into insulation or cleaning cloths may represent worthwhile recovery but the material has effectively left the textile loop. The far bigger prize is textile-to-textile recycling where old garments become new garments - and that's much harder.

Modern clothing can contain complex combinations of natural and synthetic fibres, elastane (spandex/lycra), dyes, coatings, buttons and zips. Recovering fibres of sufficient quality and at a competitive price remains a significant international challenge. Naseej cannot therefore be described as a closed-loop system; but rather an attempt to assemble the pieces from which one might eventually be built.
Possibly the most interesting part of the experiment is that someone then has to actually want the finished product, and research suggests UAE consumers are actually receptive to sustainability. Previous surveys have found strong stated willingness to pay more for goods made from recycled or environmentally preferable materials, while public reaction to Naseej's Fabric of Possibility campaign at Yas Mall was encouraging, but what consumers say about sustainability and what they actually buy are not necessarily the same thing.

The UAE makes this particularly interesting because it combines considerable consumer wealth with a substantial premium and luxury retail market. To the money paying UAE citizen, does 'made using recycled textile fibre' add value because it represents sustainability, technology and modern manufacturing or does recycled still suggest something previously used or somehow inferior? A recycled-fibre garment is not necessarily a second-hand garment; the material can be recovered, processed and manufactured into an entirely new product and that distinction could prove crucial.

Governments can mandate collection; businesses can provide containers; recyclers can recover fibre and manufacturers can make new products but ultimately somebody still has to buy them.

Naseej is too young to judge by results but eventually the questions should be simple. Does that 88% landfill rate fall? How much collected material is genuinely reused or recycled, how much recovered fibre returns to textile manufacture and, crucially, do consumers actually buy the products made from it?

Europe is constructing a regulatory framework intended to make textile producers responsible for circularity. The UAE is initially attempting to bring government, industry, technology and consumers together around the same objective. Perhaps the successful model will ultimately require elements of both because whichever route is chosen, both eventually arrive at exactly the same place. More like this (textile recycling) - link - more like this (UAE) - link

(GUF) CASABLANCA - HERE'S LOOKING AT EFW

Image inspiration - René Magritte - link

Every so often, a waste infrastructure announcement deserves considerably more attention than the number of tonnes it will process. The newly announced Casablanca Solid Waste Treatment and Valorisation Project is definitely one of them.

Kanadevia Inova (built The Slough Multifuel facility) working in partnership with Moroccan energy company Nareva and Japanese trading group Itochu, has signed a 33.5-year concession agreement with the Municipality of Casablanca for what will become Morocco’s first major integrated waste-to-energy infrastructure project.

The headline numbers are extraordinary. The proposed facility will process approximately 1.5 million tonnes of municipal waste every year. For those familiar with the UK waste industry, the sheer scale of the Casablanca project is perhaps best understood by comparing it with Viridor’s Energy Recovery Facility at Ardley in Oxfordshire. Ardley is itself a substantial facility, capable of processing approximately 378,000 tonnes of residual waste each year. Casablanca is expected to process 1.5 million tonnes annually – almost exactly four times Ardley’s capacity.

Its proposed 126 MW of waste-to-energy generation is also approaching five times Ardley’s generating capability and that's before Casablanca’s additional 50 MW of solar PV and 4 MW of landfill-gas generation are even considered. Put another way, the equivalent of four Ardley sized Energy Recovery Facilities combined into one development, then add a major solar installation and landfill-gas recovery system alongside them. That begins to convey the extraordinary scale of what is being proposed. Casablanca should therefore not simply be regarded as a large waste-to-energy project by African standards; it is a major international scale energy and waste infrastructure development being constructed in Africa.

The investment, likewise is vast. Approximately US$1.5 billion. Construction is expected to begin before the end of this year (2026), subject to completion of financing, with full operation targeted for 2030.

But perhaps the most interesting number isn't 126 MW, 1.5 million tonnes or even $1.5 billion; it's 33.5 years. This isn't simply an incinerator; the concession period tells us something about how Morocco is approaching the project. This is being treated as long-term national and municipal infrastructure.

Located alongside the existing Mediouna landfill, the development combines treatment of Casablanca's future municipal waste with recovery of energy from existing landfill gas and substantial solar generation. Electricity off take arrangements with SRM Casablanca-Settat and Morocco's national electricity and water utility ONEE provide another important piece of the model, essentially bringing several traditionally separate problems together: waste disposal, landfill dependency, renewable and recovered energy, electricity demand, urban growth and carbon reduction.

The consortium expects the project to recover value from approximately 80% of Casablanca's municipal waste through treatment, material and energy recovery, substantially reducing the amount requiring landfill disposal. That alone would represent a profound change in the way one of Africa's major cities manages its resources but the implications could stretch far beyond Morocco.

Africa has an enormous waste problem and an enormous opportunity. It's urbanising rapidly and with growing cities, consumption is increasing and municipal waste generation is rising accordingly but across much of the continent waste infrastructure has struggled to keep pace. Collection remains incomplete in many regions; open dumping remains widespread; modern sanitary landfill capacity is unevenly distributed while sophisticated treatment and resource recovery infrastructure remains relatively uncommon.

At the same time, electricity demand is growing; waste and energy supply have traditionally been treated as separate infrastructure challenges and Casablanca suggests that they don't necessarily have to be. Waste that previously represented an environmental liability can simultaneously become part of an urban energy system.

Large thermal waste-to-energy plants remain remarkably rare in Africa. The best known example is the Reppie facility in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, opened in 2018 and designed to process approximately 1,400 tonnes of waste per day with generating capacity of around 25 MW. Casablanca is in another category. At approximately 1.5 million tonnes annually, it represents more than 4,000 tonnes of municipal waste every day. Its proposed 126 MW thermal WtE capacity is around five times that of Reppie and that's before its 50 MW of solar and 4 MW of landfill-gas generation are considered.

This is no demonstration plant or a small technology trial, It's major metropolitan infrastructure and most importantly, international companies and municipal and energy authorities are prepared to structure it over more than three decades. The biggest obstacle to large scale waste-to-energy development across Africa has never simply been technology. Modern EfW technology is well established. The harder problem is making the economics work. A billion dollar plant needs confidence that waste will arrive tomorrow, next year and twenty years from now. It needs reliable collection, sufficient feedstock, predictable revenues and somebody prepared to buy the generated electricity. It needs municipalities capable of entering long-term agreements and it needs investors prepared to commit enormous amounts of capital and Casablanca appears to bring several of those pieces together.

The municipality provides the long-term waste concession. The city provides an enormous waste stream. Energy off-take arrangements provide a market for the electricity. International technology and investment partners provide expertise and capital and the 33.5-year concession provides the timescale necessary to make major infrastructure investment possible.

Most importantly, this technology allows developing economies to leapfrog infrastructure generations. Large parts of Africa did not build Europe's enormous fixed line telephone networks before adopting mobile communications; they effectively skipped a technological generation and this level of waste infrastructure may present a similar opportunity.

Waste-to-energy is not a magic answer to Africa's waste problem. It requires effective emissions controls, competent regulation, reliable waste collection, appropriate waste composition, responsible management of residues and protection of recycling systems.

Nor should recyclable materials simply be burnt because an incinerator requires feedstock. Africa also has enormous potential for composting and anaerobic digestion because municipal waste in many regions contains a high proportion of organic material.

This Casablanca project should be celebrated by the city, the country, the continent of Africa and the global waste industry as it represents so much more than burning rubbish. More like this (energy from waste) - link - more like this (Morocco) - link - more like this (Africa) - link