(GUF) THE DRS CLOCK IS TICKING

Image inspiration - Leonora Carrington - link

Britain's Deposit Return Scheme is due to go live on 1 October 2027. On that morning, millions of drinks containers will suddenly acquire a 20p value and consumers will quite reasonably expect to be able to return them and get their money back.

The concept is simple; the logistics behind it are anything but. As the DRS logistics procurement reaches its final stages, the organisations responsible for physically making the system work face an enormous operational challenge. Government planning documents envisage a national infrastructure capable of dealing with the registration and reporting of more than 20 billion containers, supported by collection vehicles, counting and sorting centres, IT systems, return points and reverse-vending machines and all of it has to work together.

What's going to happen

From October 2027, bottles and cans are not simply going to disappear into existing recycling collections. They'll begin travelling backwards through an entirely new supply chain. Reverse-vending machines and manual return points will receive them. Containers will have to be stored, vehicles will collect them, routes will have to be planned and continually adjusted, depots and counting centres will have to process them. Barcodes must be recognised, deposits reconciled and enormous quantities of data transferred accurately between retailers, producers, contractors and the Deposit Management Organisation.

Vehicles have to be sourced, drivers recruited, depot capacity secured, processing equipment installed, software developed and integrated, staff trained, routes modelled, contingency arrangements created. Then somebody has to test the whole thing under something approaching real-world conditions.

Exchange for Change itself identifies operational readiness, system building and testing as key priorities ahead of October 2027, while its current information says full collection arrangements follow completion of the logistics tender. The danger is therefore not that nobody has thought about DRS, it's that a plan on a screen and an operating national logistics network are two very different things.

Where others have stumbled

Germany provides perhaps the clearest warning. Its mandatory deposit requirement arrived in 2003 but Germany's Constitutional Court later recorded that industry had not built a functioning clearing system ready for the January 2003 introduction. The nationwide standardised DPG system we now associate with Germany did not arrive until May 2006. Today it is exceptionally successful with return rates above 96% but getting there was not instantaneous.

Ireland launched its DRS in February 2024 with more than 2,000 return points. Its first year ultimately became a considerable success with more than 980 million containers returned but that figure also illustrates how quickly a new system has to scale once consumers adopt it.

Romania offers another useful comparison. Its scheme began at the end of 2023 and by its first anniversary consumers had returned more than three billion containers. By November 2024 its monthly collection rate had reached 76%. Again, the lesson isn't that DRS failed — it is that a national return system goes through a very substantial operational ramp-up once real containers replace forecast numbers on spreadsheets.

What needs to be done

Britain needs to spend the remaining implementation period trying to break the system before the public does it for us. Don't just test whether a reverse-vending machine accepts a bottle.

• Test what happens when fifty machines in one area fill simultaneously on a Saturday afternoon.
• Test what happens when a collection vehicle breaks down.
• Test Christmas.
• Test a heatwave.
• Test football finals and festivals.
• Test what happens when actual return volumes are 30% above the model.
• Test the communications network going down, incorrect barcodes, rejected containers, missed collections, overflowing storage areas and processing equipment operating at maximum capacity.

Most importantly, test the interfaces between organisations. A retailer's machine may work perfectly and the haulier may have enough vehicles, but neither helps if the information telling one when the other needs collecting doesn't work.

What we need to be mindful of

The UK DRS does not need to be perfect on day one but it does need to be resilient. There will inevitably be problems. Vehicles will fail, machines will break, forecasts will be wrong and consumers will behave differently from the models. The test of the system will therefore not be whether something goes wrong, it'll be whether sufficient spare capacity, people, vehicles, processing capability and contingency have been built into the system to recover when it does.

Germany eventually created one of the best-performing deposit systems in the world. Ireland's scheme rapidly grew into a major collection system. Romania moved billions of containers during its first year but their experience should remove any temptation to think that October 2027 is simply a date on which Britain flicks a switch.

We are attempting to build an enormous new national reverse-logistics network and the clock is already ticking. More like this (DRS) - link - more like this (Germany) - link - more like this (Romania) - link - more like this (Ireland) - link

(GUF) WASTE TO H2 TO WASTE

Image inspiration - Man Ray - link

Toyota is taking a hydrogen fuel cell Hilux to the Dakar Rally. The DKR GR FC Hilux will compete in the experimental Dakar Future Mission 1000 category in January 2027 covering 1,000 competitive kilometres across 13 stages. Toyota hopes to demonstrate that hydrogen fuel cell technology can withstand heat, dust, vibration and the general mechanical brutality of desert competition.

It's an impressive engineering project but the more revealing test of hydrogen may be taking place at considerably lower speeds, stopping every few yards to empty bins. If hydrogen has a serious future in heavy transport, the waste industry ought to be one of the places where it can prove itself.

Waste collection is not ordinary transport

We already operate fully electric waste collection vehicles, however our initial decision to adopt them was not made without reservations. Most discussions about electric commercial vehicles overlook a fundamental difference between delivering goods and collecting waste. A delivery vehicle generally leaves its depot fully charged and heavily laden. As it completes its round, it becomes progressively lighter. A waste collection vehicle does precisely the opposite. It leaves the depot with a full battery but an almost empty body. As its working day progresses, the remaining charge falls while the vehicle becomes steadily heavier. By the time it is carrying its greatest payload, it has its smallest remaining energy reserve.

Propelling the vehicle is only part of the demand. Energy is also needed to lift containers, operate hydraulic equipment and repeatedly compact the collected material. The vehicle may stop and start hundreds of times during a single round. Regenerative braking can recover some of that energy. Predictable routes and overnight depot charging also make waste collection well suited to electrification but those advantages do not erase its unusual operating profile. A waste collection vehicle is not simply a delivery lorry with bins substituted for parcels.

Is this where hydrogen enters?

A hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is still essentially electric. Hydrogen passes through a fuel cell to generate electricity which powers an electric motor. A battery normally provides additional energy storage and handles peaks in demand. Its potential advantage is that additional operating range can be carried as hydrogen rather than through an enormous battery pack. Refuelling can also take minutes rather than hours. For a heavy waste vehicle, that could offer several benefits such as longer working rounds, quicker return to service, less dependence on lengthy charging windows, greater suitability for double shift operations and potentially less loss of payload to battery weight.

That last point matters. Every kilogram occupied by batteries, tanks or propulsion equipment is a kilogram that cannot be used to carry waste. A zero emission vehicle that repeatedly reaches its legal weight before its body is full may be environmentally admirable but operationally expensive. Hydrogen does not need to outperform batteries on every route. It only needs to solve the duties on which battery electric vehicles struggle.

Norba has already built one

This isn't merely a concept waiting for Toyota to finish playing in the sand. Geesinknorba has already participated in the development of hydrogen powered waste collection vehicles. One vehicle produced through the European HECTOR programme used an electric Mercedes Econic low-entry chassis, Geesinknorba collection equipment, a 145 kWh battery and four hydrogen tanks storing a total of 20 kg at 350 bar.

Its anticipated operating range on hydrogen was approximately 120 km. Other vehicles in the programme used different combinations of fuel cells, batteries and storage pressures. Some were designed around 350-bar hydrogen and others around 700 bar. The variation tells us something important, i.e. the industry has not yet settled upon a standard technical formula. These were not mass produced vehicles rolling from a mature production line. They were early generation machines assembled from conventional chassis, specialist waste bodies, batteries, fuel cells and hydrogen storage systems supplied by several different businesses. That's engineering development, not yet straightforward fleet procurement.

The HECTOR experiment

HECTOR—Hydrogen Waste Collection Vehicles in North West Europe was led by the amazingly foresighted Aberdeen City Council and involved vehicles operating in Aberdeen, Groningen, Arnhem, Duisburg, Herten, Brussels and Touraine. Its purpose was to examine fuel cell refuse vehicles under actual working conditions. The project covered urban stop-start collections and longer rural rounds, with operators gathering information on procurement, infrastructure, training, maintenance and vehicle performance. The early financial comparison was sobering.

HECTOR estimated the purchase price of a conventional refuse vehicle at between €220,000 and €300,000. A hydrogen fuel cell equivalent was estimated at between €630,000 and €751,000 (approximately two to three times as much).

The vehicles typically stored between 15 and 20 kg of hydrogen. Expected urban range was around 120 km, potentially rising considerably on rural routes where the vehicle was not constantly stopping, lifting and compacting. One truck was expected to consume roughly one complete 15–20 kg fill during a working day. Operators also had to consider depot alterations, hydrogen detection, ventilation, specialist maintenance, driver training and a secure supply of suitably pure fuel. Planning and constructing a permanent hydrogen station could take up to two years and that's the less glamorous side of hydrogen adoption. Buying the vehicle is only the opening ceremony. Keeping it fuelled, maintained and earning money is the actual project. The HECTOR operational handbook describes both the potential and the considerable practical preparation involved.

The hydrogen question begins before the vehicle moves

A fuel cell vehicle emits water rather than carbon dioxide at the point of use. That makes it attractive in towns and cities where air quality and noise matter, however, “zero-emission” at the tailpipe is not the same as zero-carbon. Most hydrogen is still manufactured from fossil fuels. Green hydrogen, produced by electrolysing water using renewable electricity, offers far greater carbon savings but also introduces a substantial efficiency penalty.

Electricity can be sent directly through the grid into a battery. Producing green hydrogen requires that electricity to be used to split water, after which the hydrogen must be compressed, stored, transported and converted back into electricity inside the vehicle.

At every stage, energy is lost. If an operator can complete the same round using a battery-electric vehicle charged directly from renewable electricity, hydrogen will struggle to make either the environmental or financial case. Its opportunity lies where direct electrification becomes operationally restrictive.

Waste could provide both the demand and the fuel

The waste industry has one further reason to be interested: it does not merely consume energy. It also handles materials from which energy can be produced. Hydrogen can potentially be made using electricity generated from energy-from-waste facilities, landfill gas or anaerobic digestion. It may also be produced from biomethane, although the carbon performance depends upon the feedstock, production method and treatment of the resulting emissions. More controversial proposals involve producing hydrogen through the gasification or pyrolysis of waste. These processes are often promoted using the seductive language of “waste-to-hydrogen”, but the description alone proves very little.

The important questions remain - what material is being used; could it have been reused or recycled instead; how much external energy does the process require; what emissions and residues are produced; how much usable hydrogen emerges and what is the genuine lifecycle carbon saving?

Turning unrecyclable waste into low-carbon hydrogen could create a compelling circular system: waste collected by vehicles powered by fuel made from residual waste. Turning valuable material into expensive hydrogen while disguising fossil carbon behind an attractive label would be rather less revolutionary. The feedstock and the arithmetic matter more than the colour assigned to the hydrogen in the press release.

Batteries have already left the starting line

Hydrogen’s difficulty is not that it has no technical advantages. It's that battery electric vehicles are already improving and entering working fleets. Operators now have practical data on electric RCV routes, charging, driver behaviour, payload and energy consumption. Battery capacity continues to increase, charging becomes faster and manufacturers benefit from a much broader electric-vehicle supply chain. Hydrogen refuse vehicles remain comparatively rare, expensive and dependent upon specialist infrastructure. A fleet manager cannot base a procurement decision on theoretical range alone. The questions are brutally practical:

• Will the vehicle complete the round in winter?
• How much payload does it sacrifice?
• Where will it refuel?
• What does the hydrogen cost per kilogram?
• What happens if the filling station is unavailable?
• Who can repair the vehicle?
• How quickly can parts be obtained?
• What replacement vehicle is available when it fails?
• And what will it be worth at the end of its working life?

Waste does not stop accumulating because an experimental drivetrain is waiting for an engineer.

A specialist tool, not a universal answer

Hydrogen does not have to defeat batteries everywhere to justify its existence. For predictable urban rounds completed within one shift, battery electric RCVs may remain the more efficient and practical option. They can return to a depot, charge overnight and use regenerative braking throughout their stop-start routes. Hydrogen may prove more valuable for the difficult remainder:

• long rural collection rounds;
• high-mileage commercial services;
• vehicles operating two shifts;
• hook-loaders and skip vehicles;
• heavy specialist collections;
• and operations where charging time or battery weight materially reduces productivity.

That's a narrower opportunity than the promised “hydrogen economy”, but it is also a far more credible one.

Toyota’s Dakar Hilux will attract headlines because speed, sand and motorsport make good pictures. A hydrogen refuse vehicle completing an ordinary Wednesday collection round is unlikely to generate the same excitement, but the waste vehicle may be the more important test. The waste industry places exceptional demands on its vehicles. They become heavier as their stored energy falls, while continually powering lifting and compaction equipment. If hydrogen can offer greater productive range, rapid refuelling and acceptable payload without imposing intolerable costs, refuse collection could become one of its strongest applications but the case will not be established through prototypes, launch events or statements about water vapour.

Operators need published figures for availability, payload, fuel consumption, maintenance, infrastructure, whole-life cost and actual carbon intensity. They need performance measured over years, seasons and thousands of working rounds. Electric refuse vehicles are already doing the job. Hydrogen must now demonstrate that it can do the difficult parts better. Until then, it remains a promising fuel awaiting something the waste industry understands very well: Proof of collection. More like this (H2) - link - more like this (waste H2) - link - more like this (Dakar) - link

(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