“Advance recycling” and “chemical recycling” including waste-to-fuels, plastic-to-fuels
Advanced recycling, also known as “chemical recycling,” is an umbrella term for processes that use heat or chemicals to turn plastic waste into fuel or reclaimed resin to make new plastic.
Many so-called “advanced recycling” projects have emerged in recent years in response to a global explosion of plastic waste. More than 90% of it gets dumped or incinerated, according to a landmark 2017 study published in the journal Science Advances.
Not only is all this plastic rubbish choking landfills and despoiling oceans, it’s contributing to climate change because it’s made from fossil fuels. At a time when all of us are trying to find ways to reduce emissions, the oil industry is doubling down on plastics. Plastic production – which industry analysts forecast to double by 2040 – will be the biggest growth market for oil demand over the next decade, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.
In September 2025, Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) released a report - Chemical Recycling: A Dangerous Deception - that exposes chemical recycling as an industry ploy to support the ongoing expansion of plastic production while causing unacceptable levels of environmental and social harm and impacts on human health, through emissions, waste generation, energy consumption, and contaminated outputs.
Fossil fuel companies and plastic producers need to sell a story that all this plastic rubbish can be recycled. It can’t.
Most of the advanced recycling proposals use a form of pyrolysis, the process of breaking down matter using high temperatures in an environment with little or no oxygen.
Pyrolysis has been tried before on plastic. British oil giant BP Plc, German chemical maker BASF SE and U.S. oil company Texaco Inc – now owned by Chevron Corp – all separately dropped plans to scale up waste-to-fuel pyrolysis technologies more than 20 years ago due to technical and commercial problems.
These processes consume large amounts of energy, generate toxic waste, such as dioxins, and are incapable of capable of transforming unsorted garbage into high-quality fuel and clean plastic resin. Instead what you get is highly contaminated synthetic gas (syn-gas) and a range of toxic waste streams.
Read the full Reuters special report
Read the full Beyond Plastic/IPEN report
July 2026 reporting by the New York Times lays out the toxic failures of the industry:
“In the past weeks, two of just a handful of advanced recycling sites in the United States have suspended operations: the Freepoint Eco-Systems plant in Hebron, Ohio, and the Braven Environmental plant in Zebulon, N.C.
Both closures followed environmental violations cited by state regulators involving harmful air pollution and hazardous waste.
Now, just seven advanced recycling plants remain in the United States, barely making a dent in the amount of plastic that’s discarded, according to Beyond Plastics, an environmental advocacy group.
That’s down from the group’s tally of 11 facilities in 2023.
The industry’s troubles have bolstered critics who have called advanced recycling a false solution. They say it releases toxic chemicals into the atmosphere and cannot reliably and economically be ramped up.
It’s a ruse put forward by the plastics industry, they say, to counter a growing recognition that the world must curb plastic production instead.
“They’re convincing lawmakers that we don’t need to reduce plastics,” said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former regional administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Local struggles:
A Whangarei plant that uses plastic for fuel and says it doesn’t even need a resource consent to do so - the court has recently agreed. The company accepts chlorinated plastics including PVC which are what cause dioxin when subjected to pyrolysis.
Two waste-to-fuel feasibility studies by Air New Zealand for so-called sustainable aviation fuel.
Read the full story (link to community struggle page)A joint feasibility study of an advanced chemical recycling facility funded by money from the Ministry for the Environment’s Plastics Innovation Fund Read the full story>>
An unsuccessful application for consent to build a plastic pyrolysis plant at Feilding, which was defeated by the community. Read the full story>>