Lake County Board members went back and forth Tuesday over language in the Solid Waste Management Plan Update on a technology taking the recycling world by storm, “depolymerization,” a type of plastic-to-plastic recycling.
Several in attendance spoke against its inclusion, board members advocated caution with the emerging technology, and the board ultimately voted 16-4 to remove the language permitting depolymerization in the updated plan.
But what is depolymerization, what is its potential and why is it controversial?
John Torkelson, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, as well as materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, is one of several faculty members researching depolymerization.
Plastics are polymers, made of a chain of molecules called monomers. “Poly” means “many,” and “mer” means “unit,” Torkelson explained. He likened a polymer to a chain of paperclips hooked together.
Depolymerization is a way to take the chain apart and recover the individual paper clips, typically through a chemical process. This gives you the original monomers the plastic was made from, usually in liquid or gas form, he said.
“You run reactions and you make the polymer,” Torkelson said. “The idea here is to take the product and run a reaction — not exactly backward — but a reaction so you can recover the monomers when you’re done using the product.”
The work has serious sustainability potential, he says. Rather than sending plastic products — which today can include everything from clothing to mattresses — to a landfill, the starting materials can be recovered and made into something else.
He pointed to some of his recently published research on depolymerization on a material similar to memory foam mattresses.
“We had great success in terms of getting 94% recovery,” Torkelson said. “That’s recovering almost all of it.”
Reusable plastic or empty promises?
Not all research outcomes have been quite impressive, however, and he said the technology for using depolymerization on “any and all plastics” is still years away. Some research on specific materials has shown recovery closer to 50%, which wouldn’t be economically feasible, Torkelson said.
“It’s got to make economic sense, along with making sustainability sense,” he said.
However, Torkelson said the research has gained “huge” industry interest, with similar work being carried out at other universities, in some cases in tandem with the plastic industry, looking into how to scale depolymerization techniques to an industrial scale.
The plastic industry’s interest is a red flag for Seema Keshav, one of the people who spoke at Tuesday’s board meeting. She’s the founder of the community-based environmental group Go Green Vernon Hills and Lincolnshire, which is focused on reducing food waste and single-use plastics. Keshav said she was pushed to start the group after seeing the amount of waste generated at her daughter’s school.
She spoke against the inclusion of the depolymerization and chemical recycling technologies language, expressing concerns about the process byproducts.
“How are they dealing with the solvents they use?” she said. “What are they doing with those chemicals? There isn’t enough transparency from industry on what’s happening in all of those situations.”
Keshav was blunt with her distrust of the broader plastics industry.
“We’ve been misled in the past by the plastics industry that plastic recycling is working,” she said, pointing to reporting by NPR that found plastic-makers had championed recycling primarily for public relations rather than reducing environmental damage.
“I think we’re back there again today,” Keshav said. “They’re saying, ‘OK, now we have this chemical recycling that is going to take all this plastic waste and recycle it.’ This technology is not proven yet. Let’s not just jump on it. We don’t know enough.”
Solutions like plastic-to-plastic recycling, or even Lake County’s Hefty ReNew program, which specifically takes hard-to-recycle plastics, were distractions from more fundamental solutions, she argued.
“I think it’s another problematic solution to handling plastic waste,” Keshav said. “These solutions give residents a false sense that plastics are being recycled, and could perpetuate the use of single-use plastics.”
Board member Paul Frank, District 11, shared Keshav’s sentiment. He was among several board members to voice his concerns during the meeting.
“The technology is still in development, and our overarching goal should be focusing on reducing plastic consumption and reducing plastic use,” Frank said. “I would much rather see us looking at policies that reduce plastic consumption than finding new outlets for these petroleum products.”
Board member Marah Altenberg said no depolymerization facilities were previously planned for Lake County, and as seen by Tuesday’s vote the county is not interested in a plastic-to-plastic recycler at this time either, given the concerns around the technology and its potential drawbacks.
However, Altenberg expressed openness to the idea in the future.
“The technology is rapidly changing, so we need to really make sure we’re watching this industry very closely and getting a better understanding of how it’s changing and the safety parameters around it,” Altenberg said. “In a couple years, there might be some technology that comes out that we feel very differently about, and feel it’s much safer and we would be okay with having it located here.”
