Coronavirus impacts on plastic recycling industry
“The world will not be the same after the corona virus!”
This is a sentence that you may have heard in several languages and tones. This is not a news phrase. This is a fact. Yes. The world will never return to its former form!
If we want to summarize the general changes in one word, we should say “revolution”. It can be claimed that the corona pandemic was the revolution of the new era.
Many industries changed their nature. The uses of many goods have changed. The attitude to health was transferred to another level of science. Human needs and desires have changed. And most importantly, “human thinking” underwent major changes in all subjects.
Covid-19, more than a disease, can be referred to as a phenomenon in the industry sector. The analysis of the type of consumption of societies in post-pandemic societies shows that not only the amount of consumption has taken a new form, but the type of consumption of goods has also changed. A look at the statistics in the pet industry alone shows this well.
Demand for recycled PET increased 10 percent in 2020, according to the annual report of the National Association of PET Container Resources, but it was accompanied by a decrease in the collection of PET bottles.
Reports from NAPCOR show that PET bottles accounted for 26.6% of US recycling in 2020, down from 27.9% in 2019 and 28.9% in 2018.
The decrease was due to a decrease in the collection of PET bottles in the United States, which decreased by 2.3% by weight.
According to a 2017 study published in the journal Science, since 1950, the world has generated 6.3 billion tons of plastic waste, 91 percent of which has never been recycled.
The pandemic comes as politicians in many countries vow to wage war on single-use plastic waste. China, which imports more than half of the world’s plastic waste trade, banned most imports in 2018. The European Union plans to ban many single-use plastic items from 2021. The US Senate is considering a single-use ban. Plastics and may introduce legal recycling targets.
Plastic, much of which does not degrade, is a major driver of climate change.
According to the World Economic Forum, based on a study of the beverage industry, the manufacture of four plastic bottles alone emits the same amount of greenhouse gases as driving a car for one mile. According to research conducted in April 2019 by John Dell, a chemical engineer and former vice chairman of the US Federal Climate Committee, the US burns six times more plastic than it recycles.
But the corona virus has intensified the process of creating more and not less plastic waste.
The oil and gas industry plans to spend about $400 billion over the next five years on factories to produce virgin plastic raw materials, according to a study by Carbon Tracker, an energy think tank, in September.
That’s because, as the growing fleet of electric vehicles and improved engine efficiency reduce fuel demand, the industry is hoping increased demand for new plastics can underpin future growth in demand for oil and gas.
It is counting on the growing use of plastic-based consumer goods by millions of new middle-class consumers in Asia and elsewhere.
Since COVID-19, even beverage bottles made from recycled plastic—the most common recycled plastic item—have become less viable. According to market analysts at the Independent Commodity Information Services (ICIS), recycled plastic is 83 to 93 percent more expensive to make than new bottle-grade plastic.
This statistic in the field of PET can be generalized with a not very different approximation regarding other recyclable wastes.
It can be said with certainty that the effects of the pandemic do not end with the industry. Things like transportation, industrial production, industrial economy, supply of raw materials, etc. will undergo extensive changes under the influence of the Covid-19 virus.
Sources:
https://resource-recycling.com/
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