这种新的回收植物使用蒸汽回收“不可挽回的”塑料

每年制造的塑料制造的360亿吨以上的大部分都没有回收。其中一些是由于懒惰所致 - 在美国，塑料瓶几乎可以轻松地回收到处，绝大多数仍然陷入垃圾中。但是其他类型的塑料在技术上充满挑战，可以回收，以至于回收者在经济上并不可行。如果将这些放在回收箱中，they end up being incinerated。

A new recycling plant is designed to process this hard-to-recycle plastic using what’s called supercritical steam—water heated to a high temperature and pressure—as molecular scissors, breaking down chemical bonds in plastic to create building blocks that can be used to make new plastic. The process works on any type of plastic, including packaging with multiple layers that normally isn’t accepted in recycling bins. “A new solution is needed to recycle those materials that mechanical recycling cannot,” says Steve Mahon, CEO at Mura Technology, the company that developed the technology and is building the new plant. “It is also important to recognize the value of waste plastic as a ready resource for the manufacture of plastic, decouple production from fossil resource and entering plastic into a circular economy, avoiding wasting this useful and flexible material.”

新工厂正在英格兰北部的一部分建造，那里的一些大规模塑料制造业于1930年代开始。While the traditional process relied on fossil fuels such as crude oil or natural gas to make plastic, the company envisions making manufacturing circular: After someone uses plastic, it’s recycled back into the materials to make brand-new plastic, and after that plastic is used, it can be recycled again, in an endless loop. Like other forms of so-called advanced or chemical recycling, it can be used to produce materials that are identical to virgin plastic. That’s different from traditional recycling, which shreds and melts old plastic and “downcycles” it to a lower quality, so recycling can happen only a limited number of times.

绿色和平等环境团体有questioned the feasibility of chemical recyclingand argue that companies should be focused on ways to reduce unnecessary plastic use instead of pinning hopes on technology that isn’t yet proven at a commercial scale (and relying on consumers to use recycling bins, something that isn’t happening enough now). “We are never going to recycle our way out of this crisis, and until we realize that, the plastic pollution will continue to mount,” says John Hocevar, the oceans campaign director for Greenpeace USA. “While recycling remains an important part of the mix for other materials, it should be the last resort for plastics—not the first. We must first prioritize reduction and reuse, recognizing that most of the plastic packaging we toss into a bin ends up landfilled, incinerated, or shipped overseas for other communities to deal with. It makes no sense to invest 10 years and billions of dollars trying to salvage a costly and inefficient technology to recycle materials that we will no longer be using by then. We don’t have time to wait for the plastic industry’s next supposed silver bullet to deal with this crisis—we need to stop producing so much plastic now.”

马洪同意需要减少塑料，但他认为这项技术可以填补一个关键的空白。Mahon说：“随着塑料制造水平的历史最高水平，我们认为，在可以减少过多的塑料废物和一次性用品的地方，它们应该是。”Mura’s technology, called HydroPRS, is “designed to recycle those materials that traditional mechanical recycling cannot, in a complementary approach, moving away from a linear model of produce-consume-dispose to a circular one of produce-consume-recycle,” he says. The demand from companies that want to use recycled plastic in packaging continues to grow. The new technology will produce recycled products that are more expensive than virgin plastic, but the company believes that it will become cost-competitive within a decade or sooner.

新设施将于2022年开放，旨在每年处理80,000磅的塑料废物。该公司还计划在包括美国在内的其他国家 /地区