Report from BIR is unclear what will be designated as banned “solid waste” in 2021.

The Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) says its sources in the People’s Republic of China have confirmed that China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) intends to ban the import of materials it considers “solid wastes” in 2021.

Starting in 2021, the MEE will “no longer accept and approve import applications for solid waste,” according to the BIR. The recycling association says news of the confirmation came from an MEE press conference held in late June.

Pertinent to the newest regulations, the BIR says the MEE considers them “in line with the policies applied since 2017 to reduce the import of ‘foreign waste.’” The recycling association also says China will place a newly revised “Law on the Prevention and Control of Environmental Pollution by Solid Wastes” into force Sept. 1, “clarifying the legal requirements for the identification of attributes of imported goods ‘suspected of [being] solid wastes.’”

The dilemma for metals, plastic, paper and board producers in China—and the global traders who supply them—is that the Chinese government has in the past several years included a broad range of commonly traded secondary commodities in its “waste” classification.

Metals producers have been attempting to get higher grades of nonferrous and ferrous scrap to be reclassified as a “resource” rather than a waste. The nonferrous sector may soon benefit from that designation, while the ferrous sector is now exploring taking a similar path.

Plastics scrap imports have been scrutinized and subject to restrictions and bans for several years. The 2021 ban seems to also prohibit scrap paper imports, which have helped feed China’s sizable containerboard and paperboard industry for the previous two decades.

Paper and board producers in China have seemingly been preparing for the ban, in part by building or buying pulping facilities overseas so they can ship pulp, which has not been deemed a “waste” material.

The ability of Chinese metals and paper producers to pay for overseas scrap and create new products is well established and is demonstrated in part by the recently issued ninth batch of 2020 scrap import quotas. According to a separate BIR press release, the MEE’s ninth batch allows for more than 175,000 metric tons of copper scrap, nearly 210,000 metric tons of aluminum scrap and more than 1.1 million metric tons of recovered paper to enter China.

The company plans to recycle boat wrap, which is made of linear low-density polyethylene, at its facility in Ashley, Indiana.

San Francisco-based Brightmark, a waste solutions provider, has announced that it completed a pilot collection program for boat wraps with a local marine services dealer near the company’s plastics renewal facility in Ashley, Indiana.

Supported by the Northeast Indiana Solid Waste Management District (NISWMD), the project established the viability of diverting used boat wrap—which is used to wrap leisure crafts that are placed into winter storage—from the waste stream. Seasonal boating, watersports and fishing are leading contributors to the local economy with more than 100 freshwater lakes in the region.

“Boat wrap is a pure waste stream that has always been difficult to properly recycle,” says Steve Christman, executive director of the Northeast Indiana Solid Waste District. “This program fits perfectly because it allows us to turn the waste into something of value to boaters.”

The wrap, a linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE), is similar in structure to heavy-duty garbage bags and is difficult to recycle as a somewhat contaminated, seasonal material. By collecting the wrap at local marinas, Brightmark says it is ensuring that these wraps do not end up in landfills and are instead being used as a fuel source for local vehicles and power boats. 

The ultra-low sulfur diesel and gasoline blendstocks produced from the boat wrap and other co-mingled plastic waste will be sold to BP where it will then go into the wholesale transportation fuel pool in the Midwest. 

“A lot of our boat owners have asked what they can do with the boat wrap because they want to do right by the environment, but we haven’t been able to give them a good solution,” says Terry Archbold, owner of Dry Dock Marina in Angola, Indiana. “Now we can give them a suitable option and fulfill that need to act sustainably.”

According to a news release from Brightmark, there are plans to expand this program to additional marinas located in the four counties serviced by NISWMD. 

There are more than 11 million boats registered in the United States. A significant portion of those boats need to be wrapped when they are in dry dock during the winter months. The amount of boat wrap removed each year adds up to approximately 110,000 tons of waste, which, when recycled, would equal nearly 21,000 barrels of renewable fuel.

“The numbers show this waste problem goes far beyond just the state of Indiana,” says Bob Powell, CEO of Brightmark. “But to us, it represents one of those really big problems Brightmark was created to solve.”

Brightmark’s plastics renewal process accepts comingled, single-stream plastics and transforms them into fuel and wax. According to Brightmark, the process leads to a 14 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared with traditionally captured oil. Brightmark’s first commercial-scale plastics renewal facility in Ashley—which is where the boat wrap will be shipped—will recycle 100,000 tons of mixed plastic scrap each year.

The technology aims to break down thermoset plastics into resins that can be reused.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Cleveland, say they have developed a new technology to recycle rigid, long-lasting plastics used in cars, planes, wind turbines and other industrial uses. Using the new technology, end-of-life thermoset plastics can be broken down into a reusable resin.

Ica Manas-Zloczower, a professor in CWRU’s Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering, and her postdoctoral researcher Liang Yue are leading research and development on the new technology. The technology aims to increase the types of plastics that are recyclable and, therefore, reduce the amount that ends up in landfills or are directed to energy conversion processes.

While soft thermoplastics can be highly recyclable, thermoset polymers—used in applications in the automotive, aerospace and wind industries that require strength and light weight—are built to be durable and cannot be recycled easily by conventional methods, such as by being dissolved in a solvent or melted.

Manas-Zloczower and Yue’s research has uncovered a new way to take rigid thermoset plastics and reprocess them to remake the original product or to make new products.

“There’s two types of plastic; one is thermoplastic,” Yue says. “Thermoplastic can be recycled and reshaped. It can be used as a daily product like bottles—those types of materials. Thermoset is another type of plastic. They cannot be recycled because they have a cross-link structure. Those types of materials [thermosets] have very good mechanical properties, [such as] chemical resistance. They are used in the engineering field as structure materials like a wind turbine blade or even aerospace [applications]—which require very high mechanic[al] properties.”

Manas-Zloczower and Yue say they are solving this problem by converting permanent, cross-linked structures into dynamic cross-linked ones. 

The dynamic cross-linked network allows reshaping and reprocessing by conventional methods, such as hot-press molding or injection molding, to fabricate a new product with comparable or better value. 

In 2018, while working at Manas-Zloczower’s Case School of Engineering Lab, Yue started questioning how thermoset plastics could be made more recyclable. He sought to find a way to obtain “a closed loop of recycling” in order to achieve sustainability and reduce pollution. Yue says he started research to see the feasibility of recycling the thermoset and then developed this technology with Manas-Zloczower.

The new solvent-assisted process called “vitrimerization” transforms the thermoset plastic into a new class of materials known as vitrimer polymers, which can be reformed and reprocessed.

The next step the team is discussing with industrial partners is a process known as “mechanochemical ball-milling” to produce tons of reusable powder resin, with no solvent involved. 

Yue says, “So far, those power resins we have recycled, we made in [the] lab and they are pure, so there's no additives. In reality, in the industry application, when we use those types of thermosets, you really have to [have] some additive—cotton fiber, glass fiber—as a reinforcement.”

Manas-Zloczower adds that fillers will allow the material to have “properties tailored to various applications.” In this way, “We can expand the range of applications depending on the properties which you get in the vitrimerized thermoset.”

“We want to start to see how those fibers will affect recycling. So, with this technology, it may take some time to figure out how can we more efficiently recycle those thermoset[s] with this fiber inside. So, that’s our next step. If we can solve this problem with the fiber inside, then we can push this technology to the market,” Yue says.

Looking to the future of thermoset recycling, Yue adds, “This technology can be further promoted to other cross-link thermoset[s] like rubber, which is also another big problem. So, with this concept, we want to further develop this or further promote this technology to apply to other chemistry.”

Eventually, the researchers want all thermosets to be recyclable, but technological problems must still be addressed in the lab before this goal can be reached.

Regarding her research, Manas-Zloczower comments, “I think it will have a tremendous impact if this technology is going to be expanded to an industrial scale. Because—just imagine all the material, all the thermoset [material] that is currently in the U.S. and worldwide— if we can actually use that thermoset for other purposes, not to end up in the landfill, this will be tremendous. And not to mention that those vitrimerized thermosets can be recycled more than one time. So, you make a material and then you can recycle it again, maybe not for the same purpose, but for a different purpose.”

Manas-Zloczower says their work over the last two years was funded in part by the National Science Foundation. She and Yue are working closely with the Great Lakes Energy Institute and the CWRU Office of Technology Transfer to identify potential industry partners, research funders or investors to take the next steps toward fully testing the process at industrial scale.

Greenpeace, other organizations want to block internal EU cross-border trading of plastic scrap.

A dozen environmental advocacy or anti-plastic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have issued a joint statement expressing displeasure with the European Commission’s proposed Delegated Regulation pertaining to new trade controls for plastic scrap.

The organizations, which include Greenpeace, the Basel Action Network (BAN), Rethink Plastic and Break Free From Plastic, wanted the new rules to prohibit not only the shipment of plastic scrap from European Union member states to other nations, but also across borders within the EU.

The proposed delegated act, however, does not prohibit plastic scrap from flowing from one EU nation to another. The advocacy groups says this will “leave the door wide open for EU [scrap] traders to shunt difficult-to-recycle plastics to substandard operations in poorer EU communities,” and would allow energy conversion facilities in one EU nation to accept materials from other countries.

Recycling and solid waste organizations based in Europe have not yet commented on the EC’s Delegated Regulation language, although they have issued earlier statements indicating many EU member states do not have the capacity to recycle their own discarded plastic.

The Brussels-based European Federation of Waste Management and Environmental Services (FEAD) wrote in a May open letter that it preferred that “proper environmental standards for shipments to third countries have to be put in place, ensuring that scrap exports can take place as an important component of the commodity market, which is crucial to more recycling.”

FEAD also wrote, “The treatment of nonrecyclable residual waste through waste-to-energy has a key role to play in a more circular economy.”

Brussels-based association Chemical Recycling Europe, in a statement it issued in June, says processes used by its member companies are distinct from energy recovery, and instead should be viewed as “upcycling” and as keeping polymers in a closed loop.

Stated the group in part, “Some plastics are more complex and some do not represent a stream economically viable for mechanical recyclers. Opening broader [discarded] plastic streams to chemical recycling would enable more plastics that are currently not being recycled to be recycled, and would therefore complement current efforts made by mechanical recyclers.”

Japanese firm’s high-stretch Solotex fiber made with recycled and plant-derived materials.

Tokyo-based Teijin Frontier Co. Ltd., the Teijin Group’s fibers and products converting company, says its new Solotex ECO-Hybrid high-stretch side-by-side (S/S) conjugated fiber is made from a plant-derived polymer and a chemically recycled polyester polymer, combined to create a coiled crimp yarn.

The company classifies Solotex ECO-Hybrid as part of its polytrimethylene terephthalate (PTT) family of Solotex fibers. ECO-Hybrid filament yarn and textile will be introduced as a featured product for 2020 autumn and winter apparel, “offering many possibilities for enhanced sportwear, uniforms and more,” says Teijin.

The company predicts annual sales of Solotex ECO-Hybrid could grow to 500 million Japanese yen ($4.65 million) in 2020 to 1.5 billion yen ($13.9 million) in 2022.

Among features of the new yarn is a “crimp structure [that] is equivalent to that of petroleum-derived raw materials,” says Teijin. The company says the yarn also has “optimized” dyeability and is “very stretchable.”

Eco-Hyrbid’s PTT polymer is made partly with plant-derived raw materials and partly with a PET polymer made with chemically recycled raw materials that include discarded polyester fibers.

“In recent years, demands have been growing for materials offering functionality and comfort, such as stretchability and soft textures,” states Teijin. “Also, users are seeking eco-friendly fabrics made with recycled and plant-derived materials.”

Teijin describes itself as a technology-driven global group that offers high-performance materials, plus health care products and information technology services and products. The group of companies posted sales of $8 billion in its most recent fiscal year.