Did you know that only 9% of all plastic ever produced has been recycled?

Today, the global recycling rate remains at a mere 9%, and even in Norway, a recycling leader, it's only 21%. This means that only about every fifth item we toss into the plastic recycling bin gets a new life.

Why is plastic recycling so low?

The process involves five main steps: collecting, sorting, shredding, melting, and creating new objects. Sorting is crucial because the final plastic object becomes a mix of all the plastic in the system. Plastic waste must be sorted by polymer type (e.g., PE, PET, PP, …) and colours to achieve good quality and save products.

Plastic food packaging, widely used and a major contributor to plastic waste, possesses desirable properties like preserving aroma, keeping food fresh, and being resistant to tear and heat, as needed, for example, in microwavable food containers.

Different plastic types are combined to achieve these tasks, with some packaging having up to 12 layers of base, glue, and diffusion barriers. While layering is essential for packaging, it impedes recycling due to the inability to sort these layers.

How can we recycle multi-layer films?

A promising solution is high-temperature gasification. This technology rapidly breaks down plastics, as heat splits the long polymer chains into small gas molecules. The resulting gas can be used to create new, high-quality plastics of any kind. This process can even integrate bio-originated carbon molecules through the co-processing of biomass and wastes, closing the plastic loop and meeting our growing plastic demand without relying on fossil resources.

How does the HighRec project contribute?

The HighRec project aims to make this technology economically feasible by improving our understanding of the breakup process and the composition of the resulting raw gas mixture. New findings are implemented into engineering models to find energetic and economical optimal conditions for the entire process.