We believe that the plastics industry is right to get as much state backing for chemical recycling as it can – see Louisiana headline and diagram below. While chemical recycling is not as neat as mechanical recycling, it has far more chance of dealing with the core issue, which is the disposal of plastic waste – see report linked here. Our support for chemical recycling stems from the view that it will be very hard to get the behavioral change needed to ramp up mechanical recycling quickly and to a level that will impact waste.
Source: Trendradars.com, August 2021
Separately, the linked blue hydrogen headline is misleading and another attempt to debunk a perfectly good (cost-effective) but not “green” perfect technology. The analysis includes methane leakage at the source, which is a problem for any natural gas-based use and NGL based use. Because methane has 25+x the global warning impact as CO2, any analysis that looks at methane leaks will minimize the relative benefits of CCS. Getting rid of methane emissions at the source is a major initiative that will only see more focus over the next decade, especially as the LNG exporters are focused on lowering the CO2 footprint of what they sell. The negative analysis on blue hydrogen goes away if the well-head methane leakage is prevented.