FOR what I think are probably obvious reasons, I am hugely distracted as I am writing this (early Wednesday morning, Nov. 4) by the results of the United States midterm elections, which is just as well, as I am waiting for some information to fill in the blanks in a couple of troubling current issues in the local energy sector. Positive thinker that I am, this interlude gives me a chance to catch up to a topic that has sat in the pending folder for about a month; an issue that is of critical importance to the Philippines, although one that is perhaps not as potentially immediately disastrous as most of what the Department of Energy is currently doing.
As a programming note, whatever the outcome of the elections in the US, I will not be discussing that here. The politics of democratic systems are weird and creepy, and this space does not allow me to employ the volume and quality of profanity I feel is necessary to discuss them with appropriate accuracy and purpose.
Now for today’s lesson. In 2022, the Philippines enacted Republic Act 11898, or the Extended Producer Responsibility Act, or EPR Act, which compels large enterprises (those with non-land assets exceeding P100 million) that manufacture, import or use plastic packaging to “manage” the entire lifecycle of these products through collection and recycling or offsetting. The law phased in the amount of companies’ covered products that must be addressed through these means, beginning at 20 percent in 2023 and increasing by 10 percent each year until 80 percent by 2028 and beyond. As of 2026, obliged EPR companies are required to zero out 60 percent of their covered products.
The Philippines’ EPR Act is similar to measures that have been passed in other countries, and was generally met with approval when it was passed, being the first law in the country to specifically address the problem of the Philippines being one of the most prodigious producers of plastic pollution on the planet. It was also anticipated that the EPR Act would encourage a boom in related investment in plastic recycling, remanufacture and the market for offset credits. Although there has been some activity, that growth of a new sector has not exactly happened yet.
On the face of it, that might be attributable to the fact that the law has only been in effect for a bit more than three years; development takes time. However, an article published at the end of September in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) suggests that the appetite for investing in plastic recycling is rapidly waning, due to seemingly insurmountable economic and technical hurdles.
There are three ways to prevent discarding plastic from becoming simple pollution, the famous “three Rs”: reduce, reuse and recycle. Reduction of plastic use is extremely difficult simply because plastic is such a miracle material, infinitely versatile and used on a scale that is difficult to even comprehend. True alternative materials that have acceptably comparable physical properties can be produced with no higher energy or resource costs than plastics, and have smaller environmental footprints are at this point exceedingly rare, and the few alternatives that have become commonplace almost always require some trade-off that is not ideal. For example, using paper bags instead of plastic bags is a significant positive step toward reducing potential environmental harm — paper is biodegradable, and can easily be recycled and reproduced as new paper products — but paper production at scale requires large amounts of water and electricity. Developing alternative materials for more complex uses, such as medical equipment and supplies, vehicle parts, electronic components and the like remain beyond our technical capabilities, at least so far.
Reuse is similarly limited, because the repurposed products necessarily have a shorter lifespan. And again, reuse is only applicable to relatively simple products. I can reuse an empty ice cream container for the storage of other food, for a while; I would be hard-pressed to find an alternative use for a broken air filter housing off a BMW B58 engine.
That leaves recycling, which is the star to which both the plastics industry and the “3 Rs” advocacy — although the latter is less inclined to admit it — have hitched their hopes. Physical recycling, which essentially involves shredding, melting and recasting plastic into new products, or using the processed material for something else such as fuel or building material additives, accounts for between 10 and 12 percent of plastic waste globally. The state of our technology is such that the proportion of plastic that can be recycled in this manner probably will not increase substantially for another decade or two. As it now stands, the dirty little secret of the plastic recycling industry is that more than half of what is “recycled” actually ends up as what is euphemistically called “resource-derived fuel,” used in cement kilns, other kinds of industrial furnaces and for power generation.
The second form of recycling, which has been heavily supported both rhetorically and by actual research and development investment by the petrochemical industry, is pyrolysis, which involves breaking down plastics into basic chemicals (the result of the process is a form of oil) that can be reprocessed into new plastics. On paper, it looks like the sort of perfect “circularity” that has otherwise remained elusive; the plastic products made with pyrolytic oil are indistinguishable from brand-new plastic.
Unfortunately, and this was the subject of the C&EN article, reality has fallen far short of the plan. Global nameplate capacity for installed pyrolysis facilities is about 850,000 metric tons of plastic annually — which is already a drop in the bucket compared to volume in existence and continues to be produced at an accelerating rate every year — but according to the report, the average processing output is less than 5 percent of that. Pyrolysis projects are also going bankrupt at a rapid pace; for example, there have been three, representing half of the total national capacity, that have gone belly-up in the US since 2024.
There are a variety of reasons for the failures, most of which seem to involve unexpected technical challenges; despite pyrolysis appearing to be a technology that can process all types of plastics, that turns out not to be the case. For example, polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene terephthalate, two of the most common forms of plastic, cannot be processed by pyrolysis; the latter produces benzoic acid as a by-product, which gums up equipment and pipes, and the former produces hydrochloric acid in vapor form, which is just all kinds of bad.
As with just about every other human threat to the continued existence of a habitable environment on this planet, it seems that dealing with plastic in a way that effectively eliminates the harm we are causing, to our own detriment, would require such profound changes to our social, economic and technological orientation that we can hardly imagine it. I accept that we should probably keep doing what we can; but I wouldn’t expect those efforts to lead to something effective until we collectively acknowledge that they’re really not going to make a difference if all else about humanity stays the same.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Bluesky: @benkritz.bsky.social
Website: www.badmannersgunclub.com
