07/10/2025

A Fight Over the Future of Recycling Brews as Plastics Legislation Gains Traction

The Wall Street Journal | H. Claire Brown | July 1, 2025

A Fight Over the Future of Recycling Brews as Plastics Legislation Gains Traction

Chemical companies, oil-and-gas incumbents and startups around the world are touting plans for new recycling facilities, promising to turn old bottles and bags into usable material. But policymakers are questioning whether some of these methods, broadly termed chemical or advanced recycling, should be considered recycling at all.

Earlier this year, Eastman Chemical began processing plastic at a new plant in Kingsport, Tenn., that it calls the largest material-to-material molecular recycling facility in the world. The company uses a chemical procedure called methanolysis to break down hard-to-recycle plastics and turn them into “virgin quality” polyesters. When operating at capacity, the facility will process 110,000 tons of plastic waste a year, the equivalent of 11 billion water bottles a year, said Mark Costa, Eastman’s chief executive.

On Wednesday, Australian company Samsara Eco announced a $65 million funding round that attracted investment from Singapore’s state-investment company Temasek and apparel company Lululemon, among others. Using a process it calls enzymatic recycling, it aims to recycle 1.5 million tons of plastic a year by 2030.

Yet earlier in June, during last-minute negotiations on a New York state packaging bill that would have forced companies to meet ambitious recycling standards and reduce their packaging waste by 30%, state legislators agreed that technologies like Eastman’s or Samsara Eco’s would not initially be considered “recycling.” 

“We had a serious concern about the pseudo solution pushed by the industry called chemical recycling,” said Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency official and founder of Beyond Plastics, an advocacy group that supported the bill. In a report published last October, Beyond Plastics raised doubts about advanced recycling plants’ yield, emissions, byproducts and energy use. The group has argued that advanced recycling amounts to little more than a marketing tactic deployed to distract decision makers from proven waste-reduction methods, like using less packaging.

Opponents of the bill seized on this distinction as they rallied against the legislation. “Advanced recycling is NOT incineration,” wrote several business groups in a letter to legislators explaining their position.

The New York legislation passed in the state Senate but was not brought to a vote in the Assembly before lawmakers adjourned.

Part of the problem is that “advanced recycling” is an unevenly defined term. “It is intentionally somewhat broad,” said Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, an industry lobby associated with the American Chemistry Council. “Advanced recycling is meant to be a catchall term that covers all the different flavors of nonmechanical recycling.”

These technologies vary in terms of how much usable new material they produce—and sometimes the answer is none at all. “Waste-to-energy” facilities, for example, break down materials for use as fuel. Critics have argued that this process should not count as recycling because it doesn’t result in new plastic products. Eisenberg said his group does not consider waste-to-energy a method of recycling.

A recent ProPublica investigation found that the dominant advanced recycling technique, pyrolysis, yields 15% to 20% usable plastic materials. The rest turns into fuel and other chemicals. Traditional mechanical recycling yields 55% to 85% new plastic.

Samsara Eco said its enzymatic recycling process can recover 99% of monomers, the materials that are combined to form plastic polymers.

Eastman claims its molecular recycling plant will boast a 90% yield. “We saw that this is a horrible waste of natural resources, to have a linear economy throwing away all this plastic,” said Costa. “And wouldn’t it be a far better thing to have a circular economy that used all that waste instead of fossil fuels?” The company has planned an additional molecular recycling plant in Texas that will receive up to $375 million in cost share from the Energy Department, plus $70 million in state and local incentives. A third plant in France is in the works, too.

State legislatures have been weighing in on the “advanced recycling” question since 2017, according to the government affairs firm MultiState, which tracks legislation on the subject. America’s Plastic Makers and others have pushed for policies that classify advanced recycling facilities as manufacturing processes, rather than solid waste disposal.

This shift helps advanced recycling plants qualify for state funding and incentives programs. It also generally means they operate in a more forgiving regulatory environment. To date, 25 states have passed legislation defining the term.

“For the most part, it does look like largely industrial and red states. That could be political, but it could also just be where the plants would be—in more rural, conservative areas, said Bill Kramer, vice president at MultiState.

Even once enshrined in law the definition of “advanced recycling” remains slippery. Louisiana and Texas both changed their definitions to exclude waste-to-energy facilities in 2023.

Lee Bell, technical and policy adviser for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, said advanced recycling advocates are making an aggressive push for international acceptance. “Here comes the playbook,” he said. “We’re going to have this molecular recycling and advanced recycling and hopefully convince regulators and people negotiating these conventions that it will be the solution, and we don’t need to have any other kind of impositions upon us.”

In the European Union, legislators are broadly in agreement that advanced recycling outputs used as fuel will not count as recycled materials, he said. But other potentially reusable byproducts like waxes and gases may be treated differently. A spokesperson for Eastman said the company was confident its facilities’ outputs will qualify as recycled under forthcoming EU rules.

Since 2022, international negotiators have been working on the Global Plastics Treaty, a legally binding agreement to end plastic pollution. “The whole issue of chemicals in plastics is still a major part of the convention, though certain parties—petrostates—really want to cut that out,” said Bell.

Bell and Eisenberg, the America’s Plastic Makers president, both said it is too early to tell where global negotiators will land on advanced recycling.