Selling a Mirage

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https://www.propublica.org/article/delusion-advanced-chemical-plastic-recycling-pyrolysis

Selling a Mirage

by Lisa Song, Illustrations by Max Guther, special to ProPublica
June 20, 5 a.m. EDT

[...]

But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and chemical companies, have worked since the 1980s to spin the pollution as a failure of waste management — one that can be solved with recycling.

Industry leaders knew then what we know now: Traditional recycling would barely put a dent in the trash heap. It’s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.

Now, the industry is heralding nothing short of a miracle: an “advanced”type of recycling known as pyrolysis — “pyro” means fire and “lysis” means separation. It uses heat to break plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks.

While old-school, “mechanical” recycling yields plastic that’s degraded or contaminated, this type of “chemical” recycling promises plastic that behaves like it’s new, and could usher in what the industry casts as a green revolution: Not only would it save hard-to-recycle plastics like frozen food wrappers from the dumpster, but it would turn them into new products that can replace the old ones and be chemically recycled again and again.

[...]

Graphics and development by Lucas Waldron. Design and development by Anna Donlan. Mollie Simon and Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

[Think. Again.]

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