The “second wave” of the circular economy

The circular economy has already entered public consciousness. Consumers are increasingly aware of the urgent need to recycle plastic, and the practice is now becoming more widespread than ever. We are now in a “second wave” of the circular economy, in which we face two challenges.

The first challenge will be to focus on “hard to recycle” resources. The second challenge is to incorporate the circular economy directly into product and process design.

Technology will be the key asset as we move into the second wave of the circular economy. First of all Upcycling technologies will be key to succeed in meeting the world’s booming demand for recycled plastic. Unfortunately, recycled plastic is often of poor quality. Pure mechanical recycling degrades the material, whereas the upcycling of plastic waste through chemical additives is necessary to regenerate polymer almost back to its virgin state. The result is a high-quality material that can be used in manufacturing industrial products. Conversely, for “hard to recycle” plastic chemical recycling technologies will be key.

Maire Tecnimont’s green chemicals unit NextChem has introduced a proprietary technology called MyReplast ? that can transform both consumer and industrial plastic waste material into a secondary raw material with physical and chemical characteristics and mechanical properties that allow it to substitute virgin polymers from fossil sources. At the same time, we are also patenting our own chemical recycling technologies in order to cope with the increasing need to avoid landfilling of “hard to manage” plastic wastes.

In fact, it is equally important to recover the carbon and hydrogen already sequestrated in the non-recyclable plastics as well as in the dry part of the municipal solid waste. Maire Tecnimont is launching several projects in Italy and abroad to produce hydrogen from plastic and dry waste.??This “circular hydrogen” is not green, not blue, and not purple. But it is very low carbon. It is a way to breaking the ice and showing society that we don’t need to wait until 2050 for the hydrogen economy. We can break the ice tomorrow.

The big issue for green hydrogen is not so much the technological readiness as it is the broad availability of renewable electrons already needed to switch off coal fired power plants. On top of it, renewable electricity is expected to become the main power source in sectors like heating and transportation where fossil fuels dominate. To address such demand, in Europe, there is a lot of debate about which is the color of the electrons that can be produced by nuclear energy. Italy and Germany are taking a negative view differently from France. For sure there is an overwhelming demand for electrification, which must be met if we want to cope with ambitious climate change targets. We need to produce renewable electrons to switch off power plants, for light mobility, and, on top of it all, to produce renewable electrons to be converted to hydrogen. There is therefore a lot of competition over the availability of a sufficient amount of renewable energy to enable hydrogen to happen.

If there is not a super abundance of green electrons, the introduction of green hydrogen may be delayed. This bottleneck of green electrons is already visible for example in Italy, which needs to build 70 GW of renewable energy from now to 2030 and currently installs less than 1 giga per year. All in all, waste management and circular economy will have to be part of the solution.

The second challenge of the second wave is the need for the so called “eco-design” of products in order to be re-usable and recyclable as much as possible. This is a big traversal effort to change the manufacturing paradigm from its fundamentals. Circular economy will be a new mindset to re-conceive all industrial processes that will force companies to think outside of the box in terms of collaborating across sectors.

The circular economy is about connecting dots. It’s about a refinery that manages waste, for example, or a power company that embraces ammonia and methanol production from electrons. Everyone has to go beyond their comfort zone and collaborate in a different way. This is a big challenge, and we need to join forces. There is no room for rhetoric.

The inventor of polypropylene was an Italian chemist named Giulio Natta, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1963. Maire Tecnimont has inherited some of this chemical engineering DNA. Thanks to this patrimony, our company can be part of a circular economy that creates a new, more responsible way to use and conceive plastic.?