Recycled plastic is earning a new reputation

Piles of plastic at a resource recycling center. Yonhap News

Cited as the main culprit of environmental pollution, plastic waste forming huge mounds with no adequate means of treatment has emerged as a future business for oil refining and chemical companies. The use of waste plastic helps improve the corporate image, and this has accelerated the reuse of plastic waste by businesses.

On November 15, SK Innovation announced that its petrochemicals subsidiary SK Geo Centric would create South Korea’s first plastics recycling cluster.

On Wednesday, SK Geo Centric held a ground-breaking ceremony for the Ulsan ARC, spanning 215,000m2 in SK Innovation’s Ulsan Complex (Ulsan CLX) in Nam-gu, Ulsan.

The company will invest 1.8 trillion won and build the Ulsan ARC into a recycling complex where they will carry out the three primary types of chemical recycling: pyrolysis, high-purity polypropylene (PP) extraction, and depolymerization. Using these techniques, the company will be able to reuse plastics difficult to recycle, such as plastic bags (vinyl), plastic composites, contaminated materials, and colored PET bottles at a level equal to that of raw materials. There will be no limit to the number of times the plastics can be recycled, practically making the unlimited use of plastic possible, according to SK Geo Centric.

From 2026, when commercial production is scheduled to begin, the company will recycle 320,000 tons of waste plastic a year. This will be about 10% of the waste plastic sent to the incinerators and landfills every year (3.5 million tons).

LG Chem signed an MOU with Samhwa Paints in August to supply chemically recycled materials using waste plastic. LG Chem will provide Samhwa with eco-friendly recycled materials for paint, which the paint company will turn into a coating for mobile devices and sell to cell phone manufacturers. LG Chem is currently constructing a 20,000-ton pyrolysis factory in Dangjin, Chungcheongnam-do to continue expanding products made from chemically recycled plastic.

Lotte Chemical launched the production of recycled materials and bio-plastic materials under the brand, ECOSEED in September. The company aims to supply one million tons of recycled materials (PCR) by 2030. For this goal, the company plans to switch its Ulsan factory, the nation’s largest PET production plant, into a 340,000-ton chemically recycled PET (C-rPET) production line.

The companies have chosen chemical methods of recycling waste plastic, using pyrolysis to return the plastic to its original material. Conventional methods of recycling plastic were mainly physical methods--sorting, washing, and grinding waste plastic to create new plastic products. This, however, faced challenges because often, the waste plastic could not be recycled depending on the type of plastic and impurities, and because the quality of the plastic deteriorated during the recycling process.

Pyrolysis has drawn attention from inside and outside the industry because it can treat waste plastic hard to physically recycle, create an alternative material for petrochemicals, and reduce greenhouse gases emitted by incineration. In particular, it can recycle plastic composites, making it easier for people to separate and discharge their trash. Earlier, the Ministry of Environment announced that it would increase the percentage of pyrolysis for waste plastic from 0.1% in 2020 to 10% in 2030.

However, some experts voice concerns of environmental pollution that could occur during the recycling process and of the toxicity that plastics have.

On November 11, an international research team led by Bethanie Almroth, a professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, released their findings in an international journal, Data in Brief, claiming that they detected hundreds of toxic chemicals, such as those found in pesticides and drugs, in recycled plastic pellets collected from thirteen countries.

A representative of SK Geo Centric said, “Toxic substances can remain after the physical recycling of plastics, but in the chemical recycling process, such as pyrolysis, the toxic substances and impurities in the waste plastic all disappear and only the basic plastic substance remains.”