Page 28 - Packaging News magazine Jan-Feb 2022

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PLASTICS & BIOPLASTICS | www.packagingnews.com.au | January-February 2022
Focus on CO2 to drive future of
Nextek founder and acclaimed innovator behind NextLooPP, Prof Ed Kosior gave his views on the future of plastics at the recent ‘Plastics and the Circular Economy – The Virtual Edition’ conference. Colleen Bate reports.
He went on to discuss energy from waste, new materials from waste, and the importance of the right mentality and design for recycling.
“Many packages are poorly designed and have never been designed for recy- cling – and Australia is a great case in point,” said Kosior. “If you go around the world, at least 25 per cent of the packaging put on the market is not really well designed for recycling.”
Moving on to food grade recycling, Kosior said it is a complex area but quite critical since the majority of plastic packaging is used for food con- tact applications.
“If we’re going to put more than 50 per cent of the site content into those materials, we are going to reach limi- tations. This is really where chemical recycling will potentially play a more important role,” he said.
On the subject of collecting and sorting, he suggested that it was ade- quate to collect up to 60 per cent of items that are put on the market as there are current limitations on the sorting and recycling efficiencies of the collection processes.
“When people say well, let’s get to 100 per cent recycled content, the reality is even if we try to close the loop we would not be able to do it,” he added, saying that it is something we have to get used to.
Kosior went on to explain that material recovery from both recy- cling and waste streams could result in potential savings of 2.76 billion tons of CO2 emissions, something that Australia has yet to do and that certain countries, such as Taiwan and Netherlands, have done, achieving a zero waste economy.
Kosior’s second key subject in the session honed in on the relevance of recycled content ratios.
“When we make a recycled plastic, we get back an average of what we put onto the market. Although you can’t detail the properties of a recycled mate- rial, you can average them out,” he said.
Kosior went on to explain that recy- cled HDPE and recycled PP have a 25 per cent lower carbon footprint than recy- cled PET, and when comparing recycled content, a 30 per cent recycled PP or high density plastic has the same carbon foot- print as 73 per cent recycled PET.
EXTRACTING more recyclables from the waste stream, the relevant ratios of recycled content, and the merits of chemical recycling were key top- ics covered by Ed Kosior as he made his message clear: a focus on CO2 should drive all future decisions
related to plastics and recycling. Speaking at the Australian-New Zealand Chapter of the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) event, ‘Plastics and the Circular Economy – The Virtual Edition 2021’, Kosior opened his session by outlining the importance of cutting greenhouse gas emission lev- els and annual flows of plastic into the oceans, and emphasised future chal- lenges faced as oil companies focus on creating more plastic as demand for oil-
based fuel wanes.
Citing a study conducted by the Pew
Foundation Trust, which looked at all the interventions that we can undertake in order to change things, he outlined suggestions for positive action.
“We have to reduce the growth in plastics production. And this might sound like heresy to lots of people. But
this change is coming. So we need to think about where governments are taking us... and we need to start think- ing about how we’re going to get there because we’ve got ourselves into a mess [that] we have to work our way out of,” said Kosior, providing a map toward a new scenario.
Firstly, he pointed out that big CO2 savings would result from an increase in recyclables, highlighting the need for countries to stop exporting plas- tics (an initiative that Australia will be introducing next year) and stop burning them (which he said is prev- alent in Europe), which would reduce CO2 emissions significantly.
According to Prof Kosior, big CO2 savings would result from an increase in recyclables.
If we were to compare unambiguously what polymers we should be recycling, we should be looking at recycling more HDPE and PP than PET.”