The value of waste

Throwing away is a thing of the past. In the future, we will think only in cycles. The intelligent reuse of waste as a raw material still holds enormous untapped potential.

Tom Szaky’s path to the global stage began knee-deep in waste. Szaky, 38, still shudders when he thinks about his first wasterecycling company. However, even then this company founder already had a clear idea of the vision that he would present some two decades later, in 2017, from a podium at the World Economic Forum in Davos – the idea of abolishing waste. After all, in nature there is no waste – only raw materials.

Szaky’s company, TerraCycle, now processes even difficult waste, such as cigarette butts, into plastic pellets. Recently, this waste pioneer has even been trying to use his new deposit system start-up to completely banish disposable packaging.

Fast-growing mountains of waste

The fact that an enfant terrible of the waste sector, such as Szaky, and those who hold power in business and politics are coming together is the result of a problem that, in view of its huge dimensions, also demands unconventional solutions. According to the World Bank, humans annually produce around 2 billion metric tons of waste. The development bank estimates that this figure will rise by about 70 percent by 2050, to some 3.4 billion metric tons.

The biggest challenge is plastic: 242 million metric tons of plastic waste – approximately – is produced each year according to the World Bank. That equals 12 percent of the total amount of all waste. Politicians are accordingly applying pressure. In May 2019, the European Union (E.U.) passed a law that will ban disposable plastics such as straws or plastic cutlery from 2021. This strong measure is in line with the action plan for closing the loop that the E.U. launched a few years ago. For some time now, the thinking of government and business leaders has revolved to a large extent around the three Rs of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle – and that principle is increasingly gathering pace.

Companies including BASF have recognized both the signs of the times and the value of acting together. In January 2019, nearly 30 companies launched the global Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW), and the number of members is growing. With $1 billion pledged, this not-for-profit initiative is promoting new solutions for minimizing the impact of plastic waste on the environment, improving processes in the waste-management business, and putting that plastic back into circulation. Partnerships for this purpose are also being formed with local organizations. “Ending plastic waste in the environment is a challenge we can overcome through sustained effort, collaboration and a commitment to innovative solutions,” says Jacob Duer, president and CEO of the AEPW and former program director at the United Nations Environment Programme.

BASF is working on contributing toward closing loops in plastics with a new raw material. ChemCycling™ is the name of the project under which the company is using recycled pyrolysis oil from discarded plastics as a raw material in production and thus replacing some fossil raw materials. BASF’s partner companies heat various types of plastic waste to temperatures between 300 and 700 degrees Celsius in an oxygen-free environment. The long polymer chains in the plastics are dissolved in the heat and become pyrolysis oil in shorter chains and then gas in very short chains. This gas is used to heat the process. “This means that a large proportion of the energy required comes from the plastic itself,” explains BASF sustainability expert Andreas Kicherer, PhD, in Ludwigshafen, Germany. The remaining liquid part can now be cleaned and processed before being fed into BASF’s steam cracker. There, the oil is again broken down into its basic components so that new products, including plastics, can be produced from them. In July 2019, BASF unveiled product prototypes from the pilot phase, such as vehicle parts and cheese packaging based on chemically recycled materials. “In the past, people would have said that you could never use recycled plastics in safety- related components or in contact with foodstuffs, but we have now proven that this does work,” Kicherer says. “ChemCycling has the great advantage that we are able, for the first time, to achieve the quality of completely new goods.
 

However, it has the additional benefit that we can declare that the item was made from recycled raw materials.” This works in practice through a certified mass balance process, under which the proportion of recycled material used at the start of production is mathematically assigned to the finished product. Viewed in isolation, Kicherer explains, pure production with raw oil will probably often be cheaper, but the resources and CO₂ saved have to be taken into consideration, as the recycled plastic waste would otherwise be processed into less sophisticated products or simply burned. However, before it is possible to use ChemCycling on a large scale, there are technological requirements to meet and regulatory barriers to overcome. 

Revamping electronic waste

Buried treasure lying dormant in electronic devices rather than in complex chemical processes is the domain of the scientist Rüdiger Kühr, PhD. He is conducting research at the United Nations University (UNU), which is headquartered in Japan and has taken up the cause of reducing electronic scrap worldwide through its E-Waste Coalition. Almost 50 million metric tons of electrical and electronic devices are discarded every year and, according to U.N. calculations, this figure could rise to 111 million metric tons a year by 2050 – if nothing is done.

In that event, there will be a danger of serious distortions with regard both to disposal and to efforts to ensure that the electronics industry is supplied with raw materials such as rare-earth elements, Kühr warns. Kühr, who is director of the Sustainable Cycles Programme at the UNU, demands nothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the production and use of electronic devices – away from disposable electronics and toward recycling and reuse. “The responsibility here rests with producers,” he says. They need to focus their innovative energies not on quick switches to increasingly trendy models, but on how to get easier access to components, how to repair and recycle electronic equipment better, and how to increase its service life across the board. 

This is where new thinking about digitalization, in the spirit of sharing is the new owning, could play into the electronics industry’s hands. According to the World Economic Forum report, A New Circular Vision for Electronics, new technologies from the Internet of Things to cloud computing hold huge potential for better product tracking, recall andrecycling. Using rather than owning – already common practice in the leasing of photocopiers by companies – is a principle Kühr believes points the way to the future for smartphones, tablets and the like. Kühr talks about dematerialization here. This means that the manufacturer remains the owner of the device, with a vital business interest in offering consumers the best possible service.
 

The intellectual resources for such circular thinking are something that electronics manufacturers, which are mainly from Asia, could probably find on their own doorstep. In his book, Decoding China, the author Diego Gilardoni points out that Western observers look at things in their own right, whereas Chinese people focus on “relationships between things.” This predisposes the country to the idea of doing business without waste. “Perhaps it is because of this thinking in terms of connections, which never loses sight of the future, that this Asian country already has such impressive examples of a circular economy,” says the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, whose China expert, Vigil Yangjinqi Yu, has collected case studies to support this. For example, the Beijing startup YCloset has declared war on throwaway clothes. For a fixed monthly payment, fashion-conscious Chinese women can hire and return up to 30 items of clothing, ranging from business suits to party outfits – all organized through a smartphone app. This is just one contribution toward curbing theextremely water-intensive and often environment-unfriendly production of more and more new, cheap-fashion collections. 

The idea of smart use and reuse, rather than short-lived ownership and disposal, is also the business model for Tom Szaky’s newly established company, Loop. When it took its first steps in the USA, Szaky made an astonishing observation, which is also a sign of a long-term change in the mindset of consumers: buyers are prepared to pay a high deposit for a product, if the accompanying service is right. “This not only makes circular economy functional, but we now have the ability to make products that are sustainable, beautifully designed and of high quality,” he says.