Getting rid of plastic wastes

The Philippines, regarded as one of the top plastic polluting countries in the world to date, needs to carefully evaluate its evolving laws and regulations dealing with plastic use and recycling.

Currently, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is in the process of drafting the implementing rules and regulations that would give wings to the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Act that had lapsed into law last July.

The EPR is regarded as a crucial amendment to the 21-year-old Ecological Solid Waste Management Act, paving the way for the DENR to formulate a national framework for all types of waste with the end view of requiring businesses’ compliance to approved EPR programs by February next year.

The EPR Act comes with tax incentives and allowed deduction of expenses on approved EPR programs from gross income for the obliged large companies, as well as substantial punitive measures as penalty for violations.

The goal for large companies would be to recover up to 80 percent of their plastic packaging waste by 2028, although the ultimate real value of the law would be in a substantial reduction of the country’s plastic wastes, one that has contributed to our notoriety as being the third biggest contributor to plastic pollution in oceans.

It would be especially interesting to see if the EPR Act, which specifically focuses on large companies with total assets of over P100 million, would make a significant dent on single-use plastics production, importation, and disposal.

Already, some environmental activists are clamoring for a stiffer law that would ban outright single-use plastics that have been increasingly seen as harmful not only to the environment, but also on humans through leached microplastics and plastic-related chemicals.

Dealing with waste plastic

The failure of past laws dealing with plastic pollution is rapidly creating severe consequences for the world, and other efforts on plastic disposal are being explored to get rid of debris that has accumulated through past decades, as well as dealing with current and future plastic wastes.

For a long time, most plastic wastes have either been dumped or burned. With the doubling of global plastic waste from 2000 to 2019 to an estimated 353 million tons, however, burying and incinerating plastics is no longer capable of dealing with the aggravating pollution problem.

New ways of dealing with plastic wastes are evolving, but many of them still have not been able to deal with the avalanche created by the world’s continued preference for plastic use now in just about every aspect of modern life.

At the consumer level, innovative campaigns are continuing for people to practice recycling measures to minimize plastic use. Studies have shown, though, that such advocacies are not making much headway given the amounts of single-use plastics manufactured every year.

In the Philippines, local governments deal with their localities’ waste disposal to the best of their abilities guided by the 2000 solid waste management law. Some have fully functioning materials recovery facilities that segregate biodegradable waste, recyclable materials, and residual wastes; others have only token versions.

Ideally, biodegradable wastes are made into fertilizers, and recyclables are put to new use or sold to junk shops. The accumulation of garbage, however, is simply too much to handle that most, like shampoo or coffee sachets, are just thrown into landfill sites.

A number of environment groups are seeking to scale up recycling or upscaling programs, but again, these have not effectively resulted in any significant dent in efforts to reduce plastic wastes.

Large-scale recycling

Other governments rely heavily on mechanical recycling, targeting easy-to-recycle plastics like PET or HDPE, examples of the former being single-use water bottles and the latter being containers. Mechanical recycling does not alter the plastics’ chemical structure, and the resulting pellets are reused in the manufacture of new plastic products.

While mechanical recycling is widely used in many developing economies, it still is not able to cope with the volume of new PET and HDPE plastic wastes. New processes, notably chemical, are being studied, although still in their early stages of adoption.

Chemical recycling – pyrolysis, gasification, hydro-cracking, and depolymerization –  alter the chemical composition of plastic waste, but offer more opportunities to produce new plastic products and even oil products like diesel, naphtha, and wax.

The process of chemical recycling is regarded as congruent to the principles of circular economy ideologues, who believe that the modern world cannot do away with plastics, and as such, must instead be able to harness it in a sustainable way without doing too much damage to the environment and human lives.

Today, most new plastics being manufactured come directly from crude oil or gas, and only about six percent come from recycled plastics. The efficiency of chemical recycling to repurpose different kinds of plastic wastes is viewed with much enthusiasm, and investment offers abound for start-ups.

Such moves, of course, are staunchly criticized by environmental activists who believe that chemical recycling is at its most basic still incineration, and worse, will only add to the world’s production of fossil fuels products.

It’s still early days for most of the chemical recycling technologies, although regulating agencies are onboard in vetting the processes, especially those that could result in greenhouse gas emissions and chemical effluents.

With the urgency that plastic pollution represents to many countries and the world at large, however, the overall benefits of finally finding some way to collect plastic wastes that have accumulated through the decades and those from the future, regulators may just go a tad easy on them.

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