“We had resources from the Legislature that we couldn’t use to hire a consultant, so we set up a little grant program for local governments and universities,” says Kara Steward, director of the Recycling Development Center.
Recently the center has been able to support business accelerator competitions, such as NextCycle Washington, which aims to identify innovative ideas that can create a circular economy for materials like plastic. People with promising ideas will get help pitching to investors and connecting with groups that have far deeper pockets than a state program, Steward says.
“We’re really excited because this is not the kind of thing the Department of Ecology does,” Steward says. “We’re about keeping human health and the environment clean, and I’m over here going, ‘But wait, I want to give money to businesses!’ Everybody around me is like, ‘You can’t do that.’ ‘Yeah, actually, I think I can.’”
New ideas that focus on solutions outside of the recycling system are also welcomed, as packaging innovations may better reduce the waste we create.
“We can’t recycle our way out of the plastic problem,” Steward says. “We’ve recycled 8% of the plastic manufactured since the beginning of plastic. We’ve got to think outside the box, do new things, and NextCycle Washington is a great way to try and give a boost to those innovations that just need a little bit of help.”
Recycling options
In a 2021 report funded by the Recycling Development Center, research professor Karl Englund and a civil and environmental engineering team at Washington State University outlined existing chemical and thermal recycling options for plastic — such as heat-intensive solutions like pyrolysis and gasification, or catalyst-based solutions like glycolysis — and assessed their viability to operate in the Pacific Northwest.
Chemical recycling can create new plastics, syngas (made from hydrogen and carbon monoxide from wood, plastics or other sources), bio oils and other products.
The report found there could be enough post-consumer plastics in either Eastern Washington or the Puget Sound region to support a chemical recycler on either side of the state if consumer recycling rates were to increase significantly — from a current rate of about 8% to 50%. But the report also notes that the costs to open a new facility can be prohibitive, especially as the market prices for end products can vary.
“There is a definite need to secure investment dollars to make any recycling process a success,” the report states. “Having investors that are educated and informed about the recycling supply chain is a must for them to be comfortable to invest in what can be a somewhat risky venture. Without sufficient investment management, smaller companies and start-ups will have a difficult time securing investments and mitigating risks.”
The research team also compiled a database of hundreds of existing recyclers. Though it was updated in spring 2022, the list could already be updated with 100 new companies trying to work on plastic recycling, Englund says. Maintaining a reliable list is a challenge, as companies often make a big splash when they announce their promising new recycling process, but some fade away if their process doesn’t pencil out or get funding, Englund says.
Massive multinational companies such as Dow or BASF, which make additives that help in the more popular mechanical recycling processes, are more likely to stick around, as their products are readily available and backed with more finances, Englund explains.
Even when new facilities do open, they don’t always work as intended. One company in recent years offered Boise, Idaho, the ability to recycle its plastic films, like bags and peel-back container tops, into diesel fuel, but much of what was collected ultimately ended up getting burned for energy rather than converted to fuel, Reuters reported last year. The company said the switch was due to high levels of contamination in Boise’s recycling stream, but Reuters noted that multiple other “advanced recycling” projects around the world had also failed or been significantly delayed in recent years, largely due to high costs.
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