Steven Kratz, PCIC President
Published Nov. 9, 2024
The chemical industry in Pennsylvania is a significant economic driver supporting high-wage jobs, generating tax revenue for communities, and advancing sustainable solutions to protect our environment. It also plays a crucial role in creating the essential building blocks for manufacturing everyday products that are critical for everyday life. The chemical industry creates products necessary to make medical equipment, renewable energy, food packaging, electronics, and more, with global demand expected to increase.
Modern society relies on chemical and plastics production and demand is expected to continue to increase.
Just as when consumers turn on the light switch and don’t see what goes into producing electricity, the same is true for the consumer products we all use. From energy production to infrastructure such as pipelines, chemical and polymer production, product manufacturing, packaging and distribution to consumers — our industry touches nearly every aspect of the consumer product journey.
Understanding the full life cycle of products also helps us identify areas where we can make significant inroads to enhance sustainability and extend the product life cycle through scalable technologies such as advanced recycling.
While companies continue to explore plastic alternatives, including bio-based materials and plastic use reductions, global plastics projections are expected to increase without significant investment in scalable new technologies to reduce, recycle and reuse.
An October report from OECD projects that global plastics production will grow by 70% by 2040. That’s an increase from 234 million tons in 2000 to 736 million tons. Plastics use reductions, replacements and alternatives will only get us so far.
Demand is growing because advances in plastics manufacturing have led to innovative breakthroughs for decades in medical devices, energy efficiency, technology, packaging, lightweighting airplanes and vehicles, battery manufacturing, and even space exploration. However, our industry recognizes the growing amount of plastic waste is not sustainable for our environment.
The University of Leeds used AI to assist in modeling waste management and found that 52 tons of plastic waste entered the environment in 2020 — 57% through open fires lit in homes, streets or dumpsters. Growing emissions issue from landfills, incineration and the environment is also creating challenges.
We need to embrace new technologies that emphasize reducing plastic waste, keeping it out of the environment and getting the most value from the products we make. Advanced recycling and the development of robust recycling infrastructure breaks down complex waste into its basic building blocks. This evolving technology allows for the most value to be extracted from plastics while also providing sustainable solutions to protect the environment by drastically reducing the amount of plastic that ends up in landfills.
The Pennsylvania Chemical Industry Council fully supports the development of the International Recycling Group’s state-of-the-art facility in Erie. This project will inject significant economic development capital into the region, create good-paying jobs, and advance real environmental solutions that will keep more plastics out of our environment and instead transform them into valuable feedstocks to reduce carbon emissions and reduce industry reliance on virgin plastic production.
It’s easy to write that you’re against everything, including recycling technologies, without offering viable or realistic solutions. We cannot simply snap our fingers one day and stop using plastics. Plastic alternatives work in some applications, but certainly not all. To achieve meaningful environmental progress, we need solutions, innovation, and significant investments in new technologies, including advanced recycling.
According to McKinsey & Company, advanced recycling could grow to 20 to 40 million metric tons or 4% to 8% of the total plastics supply by 2030. The same report believes more than $40 billion of total investment will be needed between today and 2030 to meet that demand. As companies continue to pursue net-zero and decarbonize goals and work to meet recycled content requirements or company-established goals, that number could balloon into a $1 trillion global industry sector by 2050.
IRG’s significant investment in Erie is only the beginning. Pennsylvania is well-positioned to capitalize on the economic and environmental benefits of advanced recycling. By fostering collaboration, encouraging innovation through policy and strategic investment, and implementing effective regulations, Pennsylvania can be a leader in attracting significant economic investment and fostering real environmental progress.
Steven Kratz is the president of the Pennsylvania Chemical Industry Council.