Paralysis by Pyrolysis: Lisa Song on Plastics Reduction Efforts

Sea Change Radio

This week on Sea Change Radio we speak to Lisa Song of ProPublica about her recent work spotlighting efforts by the plastics industry to make its fossil fuel-based products seem benign. We examine how plastic recycling falls short in many areas, look at the problems surrounding a relatively new plastic recycling process called pyrolysis, and then discuss her trip to Ottawa, Canada where she attended a UN conference which purported to be plastic-free.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Lisa Song (LS) | 00:28 – The first big lesson is just that pyrolysis is very inefficient. If you start out with a hundred pounds of plastic waste that you feed into the pyrolysis process, by the end, only 15 or 20 pounds of that original trash becomes a new plastic product.

Narrator | 00:50 – This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Lisa Song of ProPublica about her recent work, spotlighting efforts by the plastics industry to make its fossil fuel-based products seem benign. We examine how plastic recycling falls short in many areas, look at the problem surrounding a relatively new plastic recycling process called Pyrolysis, and then discuss her trip to Ottawa, Canada where she attended a UN conference, which purported to be plastic-free.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:37 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Lisa Song. Lisa is a reporter at ProPublica. Lisa, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

Lisa Song (LS) | 01:45 – Thanks for having me.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:47 – Always a pleasure to have you on the show. You’ve been doing some important work in the plastic space. Recently covered a quote unquote plastic free conference up in Ottawa, Canada. And then you’ve written a really well researched piece called Selling a Mirage about the problems with plastic recycling. Why don’t we first start with that, this new pyrolysis technology, which ExxonMobil has called the circularity of plastic. I like that. Why is plastic not as circular as ExxonMobil might want it to seem?

Lisa Song (LS) | 02:24 – Yeah, so the story I wrote was about a particular form of chemical recycling and chemical recycling, or what the industry likes to call advanced recycling is this whole collection of ways to recycle hard to recycle plastic. And the most popular form of chemical recycling is called pyrolysis. And so that’s what my story was about. Pyrolysis basically means you take a bunch of plastic trash and you heat it up at very high temperatures until you break all of the chemical bonds and you end up with the molecular building blocks of plastic, and then you use those to make new plastic. So the plastics industry has been marketing pyrolysis and chemical recycling for a while now, and they’re really touting it as this kind of miracle cure because with pyrolysis, you can recycle things like plastic bags and a lot of food packaging and, and think of the sort of flimsy plastic that we use every day in, in packaging or, um, to, uh, as containers for, um, crackers and chips and cookies that you buy from the grocery store. Those kinds of things. You can’t really recycle in your regular blue recycling bin. And pyrolysis is supposed to be the solution to that.

Alex Wise (AW) | 03:47 – And it’s kind of the holy grail for plastic recyclers. I can imagine. Where you wouldn’t want to be as beholden to dividing up all the plastics is that one of the advantages is that on paper you would be able to take a milk jug or a plastic detergent container and then some plastic wrap, and then throw it all into a big bin and melt it down, and then voila, you’ve got a whole new substrate to work with. Is that the basic concept?

LS | 04:18 – Yeah. So one of the ways that it’s been marketed is that pyrolysis can take a bunch of the messy, dirty mixed plastic waste that you can’t recycle normally, and it will turn it all into brand new pristine plastic that’s so clean. You could use it as food packaging. Um, that’s one of the biggest selling points of pyrolysis.

AW | 04:41 – And one of the downsides of this pyrolysis technology is that gas is released in the heating process, right?

LS | 04:48 – Yeah. So as it turns out, pyrolysis is a very energy intensive process, and it’s also quite polluting. The overall environmental footprint of pyrolysis is quite a bit larger than the environmental effects of, uh, just regular, um, traditional plastic recycling. And one of the things that I found is that even though there is so much advertising about pyrolysis and how wonderful chemical recycling is, there’s actually very, very little new plastic being made through Pyrolysis. So the reason I got into this story was because I had seen a press release from ExxonMobil and a couple of other companies where they were advertising these plastic cups that had been made through pyrolysis Yes, fruit cups. Think of the little like cups filled with diced fruit, and then you’d, you know, put it in your lunchbox and bring it to eat, um, at work or at school or something that, that those were the products that were being made and marketed. And when I saw that press release, it was the first time I had seen evidence of a real consumer product made through pyrolysis. So I had all kinds of questions. I contacted Exxon and the other two companies and really tried to ask them, you know, tell me all about how you made these fruit cups. How many did you make? Can I go to my grocery store and buy them? Can I go to my local target and buy them? How do I get my hands on these? And I really just got very few answers to any of my questions. It ended up being this product that was still shrouded in mystery, and as far as I could tell, I couldn’t find it anywhere at my local store or any kind of shopping center. And that’s what really got me interested in trying to learn as much as I could about pyrolysis.

AW | 06:37 – And it seems like a lot of regulators and policy makers have bought into the idea without knowing as much as, let’s say you’ve learned just in your limited time spent researching this subject, half of all US states have eased air pollution rules for the pyrolysis process. That’s kind of remarkable to me.

LS | 06:57 – Yeah. What is interesting is that there are only a few active pyrolysis facilities in the US and there are some more that are active in Europe, and many of these facilities have gotten various kinds of government grants or subsidies or funding or in order to support this industry and its growth. So there’s this kind of strange contradiction where on the one hand, there’s not a lot of pyrolysis actually happening. It is a very technical, difficult and very expensive process. But on the other hand, the industry is pushing for all kinds of regulatory changes to make this particular technology easier to do and easier to support as new facilities are being proposed or built.

AW | 07:45 – And getting back to the fruit cup for a second, you went down this rabbit hole. Why don’t you take us through this process? First Printpack, that’s the company that uses pyrolysis. Sorry, were they the PR company or was that the company that produced the cup itself?

LS | 08:02 – So the way it worked was ExxonMobil basically made the plastic through pyrolysis print cup, then made the physical cups using that plastic Yes, Printpack. A separate company made the actual cups. And then a third company, Pacific Coast producers supplied the fruit that went into these fruit cups.

AW | 08:24 – So there were three companies that worked together that produced this fruit cup package. You went down this rabbit hole with this fruit cup, which was produced by this consortium using, they claim 30% recycled plastic, 30% ISCC plus certified circular, a mass balance free attribution. But you then talk to experts in the field to try to understand what that really means. Why don’t you break it down for us?

LS | 08:55 – So I basically came away from this story with several big lessons. Um, the first big lesson is just that pyrolysis is very inefficient. If you start out with a hundred pounds of plastic waste that you feed into the pyrolysis process, by the end, only 15 or 20 pounds of that original trash becomes a new plastic product. Maybe in some of the fancier, newer forms of pyrolysis, you may get 30 pounds, but at the end of the day, the vast majority of the plastic you feed in doesn’t actually become new plastic. So that’s the first lesson I learned about pyrolysis. The second lesson I learned is that when you make a plastic product like a fruit cup or, or a toy, or you know, a butter container or something out of pyrolysis, what you get at the end only contains very little recycled plastic just because of how the process works. You end up with something that has maybe 2% recycled content or 5%, but what the industry has done is they’re using this sort of mathematical shuffling process that’s called mass balance. And through mass balance, they can take something that has only 2% recycled plastic, and they’re able to market that as 20 or 30% recycled content. Let’s put aside the 15 to 20% thing for now. That’s just an efficiency thing, right? Most of the plastic you put in is not going to become new plastic. Let’s put that aside for now. If you’re just focused on recycled content, what happens is when you make new plastic out of pyrolysis, what you end up with is something that physically only contains maybe 2% or 5% recycled plastic. That’s just how the process works. But the industry can use something called mass balance. And through mass balance, they’re able to market the final product as 20% or 30% recycled. And this sort of weird math that they’re using called Mass Balance, what they’re saying is they’re basically inflating the recycled ness of the final product. And it, it’s kind of a complicated mathematical thing. And in my story, I end up explaining it through these diagrams and pictures and, um, animation, and you really kind of have to see it visually to understand how mass balance works.

AW | 11:32 – It takes a lot more sleight of hand than, let’s say, 2% milk.

LS | 11:37 – Sure, yeah. It is a kind of sleight of hand. And what ends up happening is at the end of the day, no matter what you think about mass balance, it’s hard to argue that it’s transparent for the consumer, right? If you are a regular person at the grocery store and you decide to buy like a juice bottle or a tub of butter, you know, all you’re going to see on the label if you, if, if that container is made through pyrolysis is a term like 30%, you know, certified recycled or 30% certified circular material. And when you see something like that, you automatically think, oh, this must mean that this thing contains 30% recycled plastic. As a consumer, you’re not going to go look at the fine print of what certified circular means, or the text might lead you to additional wording that talks about mass balance. You’re not going to stand there in the grocery store and Google what mass balance means. Right? And that’s, that’s really the, the, the heart of the problem is that it’s a very opaque process. It’s a very technical terminology, and the average consumer has no hope of understanding that when they see a label that says 30% certified circular, it actually means it physically contains just a few percent recycled content.

(Music Break) | 12:36

AW | 13:36 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Lisa Song, she’s a reporter for ProPublica. So Lisa, speaking about the labels that claim X percent recyclable plastic on it, the obvious conclusion one might reach is that, okay, you just need to look for something that’s a hundred percent recycled plastic, but it’s not so simple, is it?

LS | 14:01 – Yeah. So with mass balance, you can actually claim that your product is a hundred percent recycled, even if physically it only contains a few percent. That’s one of the things mass balance allows you to do. Um, what you end up doing is you take a small percentage, like let’s say you make a hundred pounds of butter containers, you would take only a portion of those a hundred pounds of butter containers and label each of those as a hundred percent recycled. That’s sort of one of the mathematical fungible things that mass balance allows you to do.

AW | 14:39 – The person who came up with this mass balance, how could they defend it being an honest depiction of the percentage of recyclable materials make their case for it?

LS | 14:49 – Yeah, their case, their case is that the reason why mass balance happens is because the way pyrolysis works is you end up making a bunch of pyrolysis oil out of recycled plastic. So you take plastic through the pyrolysis process and you end up with this, um, oily substance called pyrolysis naptha, and naptha is kind of one of the building blocks of plastic.

AW | 15:15 – And is that different from nurdles?

LS | 15:17 – It’s different from nurdles. Yeah. It’s different from nurdles. Nurdles are physical like beads. Naptha is a liquid, it’s like an oily, oily liquid. Regular plastic, non-recycled plastic is made from regular fossil fuel naptha. So you take crude oil, you process it, turn it into naptha, and then you turn that naptha into a plastic product. The way you make new plastic from Pyrolysis is you end up with pyrolysis naptha, which is basically recycled material, and then you have regular naptha, which is non recycled crude oil naptha, and you have to mix them together. You’re not, because of the way the technology works and because of the various, uh, contaminants that are in the pyrolysis naptha, you can’t make a plastic cup out of a hundred percent pyrolysis naptha. You have to dilute that pyrolysis naptha with a ton of fossil fuel naptha. That’s why at the end of the day, the products you make only contain, you know, maybe 5% or 2% recycled content because you are making that plastic cup out of a batch of, you know, 95% fossil fuel naptha and 5% pyrolysis naptha. Now, what the industry is saying is that, you know, if I put in, uh, a hundred pounds of pyrolysis naptha at the beginning of the process, I should be able to assign a hundred pounds of plastic product at the end as recycled, even if the items only have 5% recycled content in them. And so it becomes this sort of mathematical paper accounting, and that’s essentially what mass balance is.

AW | 17:05 – So let’s get away from the fudgy math, because the bottom line is that it’s not what it claims to be, but even if pyrolysis were completely on the up and up and it didn’t have any polluting gases emitting from its process, if, if it was everything the industry had dreamed of, and it was coming true, right now we’re looking at the vast, vast majority of plastic recycling is happening at waste management level. I imagine they’re not using a lot of pyrolysis. Correct?

LS | 17:37 – Right. None of your municipal, you know, when your plastic bin outside, where you throw in your soda bottles, when that gets hauled away by the truck and taken to a regular recycling center, your regular recycling center is not doing pyrolysis. Pyrolysis involves very expensive fancy equipment that is used by refineries and other petrochemical facilities. And so what, in order to do the complete pyrolysis process and turn what you make into a new product, you end up using the very facilities and equipment that you find at petrochemical facilities. And so that’s why there are only a few places in the country that are actively using Pyrolysis to turn plastic trash into new plastic products.

AW | 18:29 – And is there a movement from waste management side of things to try to upgrade facilities to incorporate pyrolysis into their processes? Or, or not? Is this strictly going to be from packaging companies like an ExxonMobil working on it with a company like Print Pack to come up with these niche items like a fruit pack? Or is this something that you could see scaling?

LS | 18:53 – I mean, I don’t know about scaling, because you can always scale things if you pour enough money into it, right? If the industry pours even more money into it, if they are successful in getting increasing amounts of government subsidies and support, then sure, they could scale things faster than what’s happening now. Um, but one of the things I did for my article is I talked to an analyst, someone who looks at Global Energy Trends, and based on his estimates in the next three years or so, at a very optimistic scenario, the world could replace 0.2% of the new plastic that we make each year with products made through Pyrolysis. So 0.2%. Yes. Steve Jenkins is the analyst who I quote in my story, and he estimates that, you know, at best, 0.2% of the new plastic we make could be made through Pyrolysis, and that’s taking into account all of the pyrolysis manufacturing capacity globally.

AW | 19:57 – Yes. Let me read to you your quote, what Steve Jenkins is saying – he’s the VP of Chemicals consulting at Wood McKenzie, an energy and resources analytics firm. He says, “the laws of nature and the laws of physics are trying to stop you.” He’s not a fan. It sounds like he has not bought into the idea that this holy grail has emerged from the plastics industry.

LS | 20:23 – I don’t want to speak for him. I think that it was clear from my interviews that he sees the difference between, he sees the gap between the very optimistic marketing of chemical recycling that is happening versus the physical reality and the difficulties of doing pyrolysis at a large scale. Again, like I said, pyrolysis is something that, you know, from beginning to end, takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of money, and it’s just physically difficult to do. Um, you know, you’re not going to like start a pyrolysis facility in your garage. I, I mean, what I found repeatedly was that the products I found made through Pyrolysis were produced as part of some sort of small-scale pilot scale, you know, experimental, uh, proof of concept batch, right? So there are some slightly larger pyrolysis facilities operating in Europe, but for the most part, there’s just very little stuff being made through pyrolysis. In my eight months or so reporting this story on and off, it took me something like eight months before I finally physically got to hold a plastic product made through pyrolysis. And this was at an exhibit at the UN Plastics Treaty Conference that I went to in Ottawa in April. And I saw this product, it was like a package of baked beans from Heinz. And these beans were being showcased at an exhibit that was from this plastics industry group. And they had put the beans there as an example of food packaging made through pyrolysis. And when I finally got to see this product, you know, I was so excited that I took photos right away and sent them to my editor and said, oh my gosh. I finally saw something made through pyrolysis. And then I looked it up and realized that again, the bean packages had been made as part of a small-scale batch of products. And when I looked at the package itself, it showed that the beads had expired.

(Music Break) | 22:42

AW | 23:20 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Lisa Song. She’s a reporter for ProPublica. So Lisa, tell us a little bit more about this plastic free conference that you went to. It was supposed to be a plastic free meeting, but that was the impetus for the conference itself. Maybe give us more insight into what it accomplished and what it was trying to accomplish.

LS | 23:44 – Sure. So the, the meeting was part of a series of negotiations for a global treaty to end plastic pollution. Something like 170 countries are involved in these UN treaty negotiations. And, uh, when I went to the Ottawa conference, you know, it was, um, I believe the fourth, um, big conference, um, out of, um, five that are scheduled. So these negotiations have been going on for two years already. And similar to the annual UN Climate Treaty conferences, these are supposed to be for plastic instead. And so you had delegates, um, and government representatives from 170 countries all at this Ottawa Center. The conference itself was supposed to be plastic free, so when you sign up for the conference, they tell you, bring a reusable water bottle because we’re not going to sell disposable plastic bottles of water there. They tell you to bring your own lanyard with one of those transparent sleeves to hold your name tag because they’re not going to hand out new name tags there. And so I arrived at this conference, you know, all prepared, like with my metal reusable water bottle and everything, and when you get there, you realize that the cafe where they sell food, everything is packaged in paper or, you know, uh, bamboo or, uh, like aluminum for example. So, so the cafe there is itself plastic free, but then you realize that there’s a lot of plastic industry representatives at the conference.

AW | 25:22 – They set up a nearby exhibit at a hotel, right, called the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, which sounds great, but it is not so great.

LS | 25:31 – The plastic industry sent a lot of their representatives to the conference. And when I say plastics industry, I mean people from the fossil fuel industry, people from the chemicals industry, and people from the companies that make plastic products. Um, the, the plastics industry is sort of this big consortium of many, many different interests. Um, many industrial interests, um, and their interests overlap quite a bit. The main, the biggest question of this UN treaty is will there be a mandate to reduce global production of plastic? What science and research has shown us increasingly in recent years is that the only way to meaningfully stop plastic pollution is to make less plastic in the first place. But what the industry wants is they want the focus to be on waste management, meaning, uh, recycling, uh, various forms of recycling because they really don’t want to be forced to make less plastic. So when I was at the conference, next door to the conference center was a hotel where I saw a lot of ads, like big billboard ads paid for by the plastic industry. Uh, there was a plastic industry sponsored truck that kept driving by the conference center. Um, and the size of the truck were plastered with billboards that were pro plastic. A lot of these advertisements basically were about very exaggerated situations. They were hinting that, you know, if the UN treaty ends up forcing us to reduce plastic production, that it would be so extreme. We would run out of hospital supplies that are made from plastic or, you know, we would run out of plastic food packaging. And that way all of your food from the grocery store would go bad really quickly and it would lead to increased food waste. These ads were just very exaggerated because we don’t even know if the countries are going to agree to reduce plastic production, that that’s actually something nobody knows right now if they’re seriously considering it or not. So for these ads to insinuate that we would have so little plastic people would die because of a lack of hospital supplies, was just a really shocking thing to see.

AW | 27:56 – Lisa Song from ProPublica. Thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

LS | 28:01 – Thanks for having me.

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the Budos Band and Gorillaz. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.