Plastic is a young material: even younger when it comes to its recycling but in Italy, being the country dependent on imports for most of its feedstocks, this activity has been developed since the late 60's at least for the waste coming from the industry.
Today the post-consumer plastic waste collection and recycling rates in Italy are higher than the European average and the Italian industry in these sectors represents an excellence both in terms of technologies and operations.
Corepla has reached more than 1,4 million tons of collected post-consumer plastic packaging waste and more than 80% has been recycled or recovered.
The challenge, now, is to increase this quantity but also to improve the quality of the collected material and, at the same time, help the industry to reach the new target set by the European regulators for the recycling of plastic packaging.
Currently, plastic waste composed by one type of polymer can be recycled through mechanical recycling. With the mechanical recycling process, plastics cannot be recycled indefinitely, nor most of the time into the same application as individual plastic characteristics degrade with each melt process.
For these reasons mechanical recycling will not be sufficient anymore and it becomes mandatory to identify new technologies such as the molecular recycling or the feedstock recycling in order to guarantee that the new targets are achieved.
Chemical recycling will deal with the plastic waste that cannot be mechanically recycled for technical or economic reasons and which would otherwise end up in waste-to-energy, incineration, or landfills, or worse still as plastic pollution in the environment.
Chemical recycling offers several solutions for plastics waste which are either more contaminated, mixed or made by multi-materials.
Chemical recycling is therefore a complementary solution to traditional mechanical recycling, as it can be used to process a large selection of plastic waste that is currently unsuitable for mechanical recycling. Furthermore, chemical recycling overcomes some of the technically challenges faced by mechanical recycling as it can produce the basic chemicals needed to create new food-grade polymers to be used in the packaging application.
Each chemical recycling technology can treat specific feedstock and therefore offer a complementary model to support a circular economy for all plastics:
• Depolymerization mostly focuses on single stream independently sorted by plastic types like PET or PS.
• Pyrolysis and hydrothermal upgrading mostly focus on mixed polymers (including multilayers, multi-materials): LDPE, HDPE, PP, PS.
• Gasification mostly focuses on mixed polymers that cannot be treated with pyrolysis.
