Material Efficiency
The term material efficiency refers to more than just recycling waste, it is intrinsic to a circular economy where designing out waste is an underlying principle. Moreover, when it comes to waste, recycling should be the last resort because it can require further resources, including some new ones, and extra energy.
So, when it comes to material efficiency strategies, why does my mind focus on the last step, end of life, rather than at the beginning of the creative process? I think it has to do with the fact that our society still operates within a linear model combined with the big waste management issue we have created. The king in this department is paper, although plastic pollution is having a negative impact on the oceans. Nowadays, from the 14% collected single use plastic, only the 2% closes the loop. The fast majority of this waste ends up landfilled, leaked to the environment and a small portion is used in incineration and energy recovery.
“Material efficiency strategies can contribute to CO2 emissions reduction throughout value chains. Despite being an often-overlooked emissions mitigation lever, opportunities for material efficiency exist at each life-cycle stage”
Overall, about 40% of the chemical industry’s long-term emission targets could theoretically be achieved by maximizing resource efficiency, which means embracing a bioeconomy and running materials in circles.
Despite the potential of circularity, those recirculated materials make up only about 20% of the chemical industry and therefore we must realize its limited impact compared to other options. Yet it remains a contributing element to decarbonise the industry.
What is the circular economy?
The circular economy is a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible.
If we want to increase the circularity of materials we must start from the beginning, the design phase. Manufacturers should take into consideration how different components (of plastic packaging, for example) must be manufactured to be compatible with recycling, including elements such as caps, labels, and additives and their behaviour in a given recycling stream.
Coming back to material´s end of the life, when it comes to purposing it back, recycling capacity is also a key element in the equation. Europe is one of the most advanced regions regarding plastics collection and recycling, although there is a capacity gap to manage increasing amounts of plastic waste in circular and sustainable ways, and there are still challenges to increase plastics recycling capacity across Europe. This is the sphere of influence where the Circular Plastics Alliance is pivoting at to boost the market for recycled plastics.
Mechanical recycling is the basis of the current recycling industry worldwide, it turns out to be a simple process in which plastic waste is fluidized using heat to reprocess it in granule form. The complexity lies in the preparation step in which the different types of plastics have to be separated by type, washed and dried. The disadvantage of this method is the loss of mechanical properties of the resulting material compared to the virgin polymer. Chemical recycling, still in a pilot phase, aims to depolymerize the polymer into the starting monomers, which can then be used again in the polymerization process. In this process, pre-separation is also fundamental, allowing the manufacture of polymers with the same characteristics as those of the virgin material.
Value chains are focusing efforts at the end of the known process, from a linear mindset, trying to maximise the use of waste as a valuable resource in order to become circular. But ensuring the adoption of design for recycling guidelines (upstream, in the waste hierarchy) is as important as achieving the sorting and recycling required capacities (downstream, in the waste hierarchy) in order to increase material efficiency along these value chains.
