As high-profile projects stall and investors retreat, The Waste Whisperer, letsrecycle.com’s anonymous industry columnist, asks whether the sector can turn technical possibility into commercial reality.
For several years, no plastics conference was complete without three things: below-average coffee, an incomprehensible mass-balance diagram and somebody promising that chemical recycling was about to change plastics forever.
Chemical Recycling. Pyrolysis. Advanced recycling. Molecular recycling. The terminology changed depending on who was on stage, but the promise remained broadly the same: difficult plastics would go in, new plastics would come out and the circular economy would finally close its most inconvenient loop.
It was an attractive proposition. Possibly too attractive. Because while the slides became increasingly circular, the economics stubbornly refused to follow them.
The past few years have been rather less kind to the proposition. Chemical recycler Recycling Technologies entered administration in 2022 with administrators reporting a £22.8 million deficiency.
The chemistry said it would turn difficult plastics into valuable oil. The administration process performed an equally impressive transformation, turning a machine once valued at more than £6 million into an offer of just under £300,000.
Viridor, meanwhile, spent around £100 million acquiring Quantafuel in 2023 and 2024. By May 2026, it was consulting on the closure of the platform’s European chemical-recycling operations. Plants have since closed, despite what the technical progress that Viridor described.
Elsewhere, Eastman has paused its proposed French molecular-recycling project while awaiting greater regulatory certainty, although its Kingsport facility in Tennessee is operating. Mura’s Wilton plant has variously been expected to begin operating in autumn 2023, mid-2024 and by the end of 2024. Its current opening date is now sometime in 2026 (according to their website).
None of this proves that chemical recycling does not work. In several cases, it demonstrates almost the opposite: the technology can produce the intended output, but not necessarily at a price, scale or level of reliability capable of keeping investors, customers and lenders equally enthusiastic.
The decisive experiment was never confined to the reactor. It was whether the feedstock, plant, policy framework and balance sheets could all function at the same time.
The feedstock fantasy
“Chemical recycling” is an unusually roomy cupboard. It contains everything from depolymerising relatively controlled polyester streams to feeding mixed polyolefins into pyrolysis and hoping the chemistry, contaminants and costs remain on speaking terms. Treating all of it as one technology has never been particularly helpful to anyone.
For years, chemical recycling was promoted as the answer to the plastics that mechanical recycling could not, or would not, process. The logic was seductive: let mechanical recycling have the clean, consistent material and send the difficult stuff to the clever new technology.
The challenge is that “difficult” usually means expensive.
Mixed plastic waste is not simply a friendly assortment of polymers waiting to be unlocked. It arrives with moisture, food residue, labels, inks, fillers, additives and materials that react badly to one another. Each introduces another preparation stage, operational risk, cost or loss of usable output.
The great feedstock paradox is that the materials most frequently offered as proof of chemical recycling’s necessity are often the same materials most capable of undermining its economics. “Hard to recycle” is not a feedstock specification within the sector, but usually a warning label.
You can’t engineer your way around economics
Producing an oil, monomer or purified polymer is an engineering achievement. Producing it continuously, at specification, with unpredictable feedstock and at a price someone will willingly pay is an essential part of a business model.
Unfortunately, the industry began trying to commercialise these capital-intensive technologies just as energy prices rose, finance became more expensive and virgin polymer remained fiercely competitive. Demand for recycled content fluctuated, while arguments over mass balance and what should legally count as “recycled” continued around it.
Ultimately, governments decide what qualifies as recycling, which accounting methods are permitted, whether recycled content attracts financial value and how virgin material is taxed. Some of the investments were therefore bets on two things at once: that the technology would work and that policy would eventually make the output valuable.
In several cases, the investment cart travelled rather a long way before the policy horse was properly attached.
Technology can solve a technical problem. It cannot, by itself, create cheap energy, willing customers, supportive regulation and an investable balance sheet. You cannot engineer your way around economics.
So where does chemical recycling fit?
Chemical recycling is not dead. It is merely being downsized from a planetary rescue mission to a collection of rather specific industrial applications, which is probably where it belonged all along.
Its strongest prospects are unlikely to involve accepting every mixed-plastics stream that nobody else wants. They will be found where a particular process is carefully matched with a sufficiently consistent feedstock, a valuable output, dependable demand and a policy framework that recognises the resulting material.
Depolymerisation of controlled polyester streams, solvent-based purification and other tightly defined applications should not be casually bundled together with every ambitious mixed-plastics pyrolysis proposal. Some may establish durable roles. Others may continue producing far more announcements than polymer.
The future may therefore be smaller than many investors imagined. It may also be more useful, because a technology does not have to solve the entire plastics crisis to justify its existence.
Chemical recycling may yet earn a useful place in the system. But it will be a smaller, messier and considerably less messianic place than had been heralded. The chemistry may work. Now the plant, the feedstock and the economics must all prove they can operate at the same time.
Before signing off, a brief word on another mystery currently exercising parts of the waste sector: me.
I am particularly delighted that certain people at a certain WEEE related not-for-profit appear to have become thoroughly obsessed with working out who I am. I love hearing the theories. Some are remarkably well reasoned (albeit somewhat wide of the mark) – so keep them coming. Indeed, I actively encourage it. If you have a fresh suspect, compelling evidence or merely a particularly entertaining conspiracy theory drop me an email!
Until next time,
Keep it sorted.
The Waste Whisperer
P.S. If you have an idea for something you want me to talk about, or your thoughts on this issue, let me know at thewastewhisperer@gmail.com or in the comments below.
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