Chemistry And The Circular Economy: What Chemical Recycling Can Actually Do

Change Cycle | Chemical Recycling



Navigating packaging compliance gets tricky when regulatory definitions don't match market realities. Circular economy strategist Christine Yeager tackles the complex role of Chemical Recycling in state Extended Producer Responsibility frameworks. She breaks down why operating capacity matters far more than announced facility projections. You'll learn how specific EPR statutes in California, Oregon, and Colorado treat depolymerization, mass balance accounting, and hazardous waste limits. Christine also highlights how emerging technologies address hard-to-recycle materials without relying on waste-to-fuel shortcuts. If you're building a compliant packaging roadmap under tightening state policies, this tactical breakdown shows you how to turn regulatory friction into strategic clarity.

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Chemistry And The Circular Economy: What Chemical Recycling Can Actually Do

Welcome back to the show. This is another solo episode. To be honest, this is a topic that I am super interested in and curious about, but by no means an expert. In the spirit of giving myself homework, I've dug into this topic a little bit. If you happen to know somebody who would be a really good person to talk to about this particular topic, I welcome any recommendations.

You can email me at Podcast@CSYImpact.com. My next interview session is next week. It's with somebody who does recycling of bio-based plastics. In the spirit of preparing and understanding what's going on there, I wanted to do a deep dive a little bit on what chemical recycling is. Really just chemistry and the circular economy in general. There are a lot of things that fall under this idea of chemical recycling. Some of it is very controversial.

I just thought it'd be good to dive in. We're going to nerd out. Chemical recycling is not a specific technology. It's more of a category. The category is filled with a couple of different types of businesses that have almost nothing in common, actually, based on some of my research. One type of technology dissolves plastic and washes it. One of them takes the polymer apart at a specific chemical bond and then rebuilds it.

One of them heats mixed plastic until it turns into oil. Most of that oil gets burned to fuel. When people talk about chemical recycling of waste to fuel, there's a lot of controversy around that technology. They're all different chemical processes, different feedstocks, different yields, different economics. That's why I want to dig into this to see what that means in EPR. What does that mean from an environmental standpoint?

What does that mean for the availability of recycling, and when are these technologies useful and when are they not? I'm bringing this up now because there's a lot of criticism around this category. There are a lot of companies that have invested in this category but are filing for Chapter 11, like Brightmark's plastic-to-fuel plant in Ashley, Indiana. Three weeks ago, Carbios, which is arguably some of the most elegant chemistry in this sector. It announced it cannot close financing on its French plant by the end of September, which puts a 2028 opening at risk.

Operating Capacity Trumps Announced Facility Projections

Here's the sentence I want you to carry through this whole episode. Announced capacity is an option, but operating capacity can be an asset. Almost every number you have been shown about this sector is more about announced capacity, not operating capacity. Almost every number you have been shown in this sector is usually about announced capacity and not operating capacity.

At the same time, all of this is happening. The Flexible Packaging Association went to California and argued that SB 54 targets are unreachable for flexible packaging unless the state accepts chemical recycling, because in some cases that's the only answer. I would say that you may also start to see this in textiles as well, because in some cases, for textiles, chemical recycling is the only answer.

We're going to talk about what's actually available, what the concerns are, what EPR statutes and regulations actually say, which is very messy, and where chemistry genuinely closes a gap that nothing else can. In the next episode, I sit down with Julia Curley of Estercycle, who is building one of those gaps for bio-based plastics.

As always with these solo episodes, I'm going to do a bit of a vocabulary check. One, chemical recycling is an umbrella, not a specific technology. There are a couple of families that sit under it. Purification or dissolution is just a solvent that dissolves the plastic and strips out dyes and additives. The polymer chain is never broken. You get the same polymer back. Some say it's cleaner and needs a very pure and specific input.

Depolymerization is solvent, heat, and usually a catalyst to break down the polymer chain back into its monomers, and then purify the monomers and repolymerizing it. Monomers, individual building blocks, polymers. Multiple, obviously poly. This works best on condensation polymers, the ones with a breakable bond built into the backbone. PET, nylon, polyester. Eastman Kingsport plant is doing methanolysis, which is a version of this. Depolymerization is not limited to condensation polymers. It can be applied to additional polymers that can be unzipped thermally. With heat, polystyrene goes back to styrene. Acrylic goes back to methyl methacrylate. Again, not a chemist.

These are all in this depolymerization category. There are conversions, pyrolysis, and gasification. This is heat-mixed plastic without oxygen until it cracks into a hydrocarbon soup. Pyrolysis gives you pyrolysis oil. Gasification gives you syngas. Conversion accepts by far the widest range of material. Roughly 82% of plastic packaging in North America could potentially go through this. There are a lot of concerns about the byproducts of this. This is why the flexible film industry is talking about this, because that flexibility of sort of accepting 82% of plastic packaging is saying an argument that this can maybe solve for the parts of plastic that cannot otherwise be mechanically recycled.

On top of chemical recycling, some people call it advanced recycling. This is an industry-preferred term for the same set of technologies. It is a policy word, not a technical one. Since 2017, roughly 25 states have passed laws reclassifying these processes as manufacturing rather than solid waste disposal, which changes the permitting needed. When you see advanced recycling in a bill, it is a request for regulatory treatment on these types of technologies.

Mass balance is an accounting method for recycled content or feedstock coming in. If a facility takes in 10% recycled feedstock alongside 90% virgin, mass balance decides how you're allowed to distribute that 10% across the output. It's not always 10%. A hundred percent of the time, it can fluctuate. Mass balance is about how you're counting that recycled feedstock in your total output percentage. This is where chemical recycling might meet the recycled content number and is a big point of discussion.

Usually, when people are talking about mass balance, they're often talking about chemical recycling, like chemical recycling's application of mass balance. We've talked about this before. Responsible end market. There are clear criteria in all of the EPR legislation around what is a responsible end market. In most cases, chemical recycling or advanced recycling is not included in that definition. Oregon's four criteria are that the market has to be compliant with applicable law, transparent on the chain of custody, environmentally sound, and achieve adequate yields.

That environmentally sound fact is where sometimes chemical recycling can fall short. Alternative recycling process, which is Washington's term from SB 5284 and is the cleanest definition that has been written, is a recycling process that occurs other than purely physical means. This would be anything that's outside of mechanical recycling, which generally will include advanced or chemical recycling.


California EPR rules strictly exclude waste-to-fuel, leaving only a narrow compliant path for advanced processing.


Feedstock Cleanliness Impacts Facility Solvency

Vocabulary out of the way. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about some news, and then we'll dive into the main meat of the show. I want to share three stories of news and a potential backdrop for this conversation. Brightmark's Indiana plastic-to-fuel plant is closed. In March 2025, Brightmark missed a bond payment of roughly $12.9 million. In mid-March, three Brightmark plastic renewal subsidiaries filed for Chapter 11. In May of 2025, there was an auction. The parent company, Brightmark LLC, won its own assets back for $14.3 million.

Against a higher bid from UMB Bank, which the court accepted, passing over to avoid shutdown and cleanup costs. In late May 2025, the sale closed, and since then, operations have paused. The plant was financed with about 260 million at the time of the auction. It was running at roughly five percent of capacity. Why does this matter? This is the second wave of the same type of lesson. Regennex and Tigard, Oregon, shut down in April 2024 after five years and about six million pounds were processed.

The pattern is not necessarily that chemistry is failing. It's that these plants are depending on feedstock that is cleaner than the waste stream can actually deliver. Therefore, the finances are not really working out for the input into this process and the subsequent output. Regennex was not necessarily a plastic-to-fuel pyrolysis plant. It was a joint venture between Agilyx and AmSty that depolymerized post-use polystyrene back to styrene monomer, sold under AmSty's Poly Renew brand.

It's still a depolymerization of polystyrene and an example of advanced or chemical recycling. Better chemistry gets you a better product. You still have to stand these things up from an economic standpoint. Another newer story is from the Flexible Packaging Association, which warns that California targets could function as a ban on this material. Plastic News shared in August that SB 54 should be more achievable with targets and explicit acceptance of chemical recycling. They are arguing that it needs to be allowed because otherwise you're effectively banning some flexible formats that do not have another alternative for recycling.

Why does this matter? Is this fair? Multi-layer flexible film genuinely cannot be mechanically recycled at scale in the US. There are a lot of barrier properties of multi-layer flexible film that cause the need. There's not really an alternative in many cases, although many people are working on this. Their argument, though, is that if chemical recycling is excluded and that target holds, then effectively they're cutting that material out of the market.

On the counter side, you cannot hit the target without chemical recycling as an argument for chemical recycling to be allowed to count. It's not necessarily evidence that it works. There's still this idea that there could be an alternative that still meets the needs but is not a multi-layer flexible film. What is the implication of this? If you sell flexibles in California, you are exposed to a policy question that you cannot really design your way out of before 2032. Recommend looking at your business and this as a big risk, and how are you accommodating?

Another set of stories from July-ish is that projects are folding. In Europe, roughly 319,000 US tons per year of chemical recycling capacity was closed. Nine of 65 planned projects were canceled. Chemically recycled materials were 0.2% of Europe's plastic production in 2024, while about 70% of EU plastic waste is still incinerated or landfilled, which is also not considered a responsible market.

This is not universal. Mura Technology still plans to open its first UK facility at Wilton later in 2026. This is saying, like, maybe the technology could work, but there's a lot of trepidation from an investor standpoint, and the economics are not really holding up. Why does this matter? The bottleneck right now is capital and policy clarity, not necessarily the innovation of science, which means the EPR rules being written this year could determine whether any of this gets built.

I want to point out that what's failing here is not necessarily chemistry. I didn't talk about the byproducts, and there's still a lot of information out there about potential negative environmental impacts. What's causing these things to fail is more the financing, the economics. If the financing and economics could work, could that mean that it's worth figuring out the potential byproducts and environmental challenges? Are there other solutions for that? That's the question for the industry, right?

Let's start with what adequate yields actually mean for the approved Oregon program plan that Circular Action Alliance wrote sets a yield floor of greater than 60%. Yield shall be documented as the output weight of materials processed and sold for use in new manufacturing as a percentage of the input weight, accounting for process loss. Yield shall be greater than 60% for all covered material categories as measured against the entire recycling supply chain from downstream to the MRF or PRO collection point to the end market.

This 60% threshold is what chemical recycling in theory would need to meet. However, a lot of times, the stuff that's going into chemical recycling is the stuff that would be thrown out anyway. It's that 40% that yields that you couldn't get anyway. Nonetheless, that's the threshold. It applies to every covered material. It is measured across the whole chain, not just at one specific step, and it must be documented separately by material type, where materials are received and processed distinctly.

Basically, 60% in plastic and 60% out of plastic across the chain. Of the three families of chemical recycling, which ones clear that bar? Purification could depend on the material it can accept. Depolymerization generally depends on the material it can accept. Again, it's limited to what they can accept. The honest caveat is that this compliance matrix from CAA is flagging things as a major or minor yield failure in the score. It's not necessarily a disqualifying list. The disqualifying findings are legal compliance, free and fair labor, child labor, environmental compliance, and audits and records.

A facility that misses the yield floor gets a corrective action plan, not an automatic removal from the responsible end market list. The number is important, and the enforcement is a little more forgiving than some of the other areas. You may have seen a table that shares, or you may not have seen this if this is not something you normally do. Anyway, you may have seen a table that says mechanical recycling is 73% to 84%. Yield gasification is 2% to 14%. Pyrolysis, 0.1% to 5.7%. When I chase these numbers, they're coming from a fact sheet published by Ocean Conservancy in January, 2025.

These numbers do not necessarily show where they're coming from. There's no reference for these numbers. It must be research that the Ocean Conservancy has done. There are a lot of questions around what the real yield is. There's still a lot of research to be done for each of these types of chemical recycling to tell you really what the yield is across material categories.

For pyrolysis, the large majority of the carbon that goes in does not come back out as plastic. That might be some of the potential differences in these numbers. It comes out as fuel. Now, there's a lot of criticism around not wanting waste-to-fuel, right? It's the same as waste-to-energy. The idea is that it's the building blocks, and in theory, they go back into becoming plastic. It would still have to go through that refining process. The percentage of coming back as plastic is very low because it's not actually plastic yet. It's the building blocks of plastic. There are lots of arguments for why that should not be a solution.


Oregon EPR requires a 60% yield floor across the entire supply chain for responsible end-market validation.


Anyway, that's how it works. A low plastic-to-plastic yield is not just an environmental argument. It's a cost per ton argument and a feedstock volume argument. If you need many tons to get one ton of polymer out, your collection costs per ton of recycled resin are high. Someone has to absorb that. Under EPR, that someone is increasingly the producer. It becomes this question of, is it worth the investment if there are other solutions?

The trade-off stated more honestly is that conversion is the only family that takes messy mixed plastic. Depolymerization has better yields and a cleaner footprint precisely because it is picky about what it takes in. There's no free option here in all the scenarios. You're choosing between handling everything, recovering little, recovering a lot, handles little. It's not a silver bullet. There never is. If we just did this, it would solve everything. That's just not the case. Let's talk about what the real capacity is out there. What's actually operating? Eastman in Kingsport, Tennessee, and Longview, Texas, are both in operation.

In Kingsport, Tennessee, methanolysis is used. It started up in late 2023. It says it's reporting 100% capacity as of 2025 and then feeding 75% recycled content to Tritan Renew. That's a strong example of polyester depolymerization in action and in operation. In Longview, there's a second plant. However, the Department of Energy canceled an award worth $375 million in May. There was a delay and roughly a two-year hold on this plant in Longview, Texas.

It's still appealing as of this spring, and the company is working on trying to finance the rest of this facility. It's not really fully in operation. PureCycle in Ohio uses dissolution. It has 4.1 million pounds of product in the second quarter of 2026, running 24 hours a day, five days a week, with outputs going to consumer packaging. It's still below design capacity. There's no indication that it's profitable yet. We'll see if they hit break-even in the second half of the year.

LyondellBasell in Germany uses a solvent dissolution process, with roughly 8,000 tons a year of input. It is also operating and would be a competitor to PureCycle. Exxon Mobil in Baytown, Texas, not far from my hometown, is in operation. In December of 2022, they were described as processing more than 80 million pounds. In November of 2024, 150 million pounds a year, plus expansion plans. In February of 2026, a third Baytown unit started, and the public target is approximately 450 million pounds a year globally.

They are operational and putting material out into the market. One more example is Carbios in France. It's an enzymatic PET depolymerization. As I said before, arguably the most elegant from a chemistry point of view. Those are words from the industry, not necessarily from me. Again, not a chemist. Originally, 2025 was the plan. Now it's reset to 2028. Carbios said financial close by the end of September is no longer achievable, which puts 2028 itself in question. Not yet in operation.

What's the pattern here? The depolymerization or purification is running on a defined polymer with a defined offtake. Where that's happening, it is operational. Where anything depends on mixed waste feedstock, on grant money or on a project financing that has not closed, the schedule is slipping. There is progress in this space. There are a lot of headwinds going on in this sector.

There's far more announced capacity than there is operating capacity, and the gap is widening. What are the concerns? One concern, as I talked about before, is the fuel problem. Most pyrolysis oil is used as fuel, not as plastic feedstock. The output is fuel. It's faster to just use that than to continue to repolymerize and make it another material. This is where the word recycling is contested because it's burned or whatever. It's used in your car or what have you. It's just one extra life. This is where most of the legislation and rules are written to include fuel as an excluded responsible end market.

This is true also for waste to energy. The mass balance definition is also receiving a lot of criticism. This is where producers might be most impacted because it's an accounting risk, not like within this sustainability recycling claim, which ultimately drives your eco-modulation. The same physical inputs can yield very different recycled content percentages throughout a supply chain. This allocation method allows users to average it out.

State Regulations Expose Mass Balance Accounting Risks

You may or may not be able to actually claim it as such. Colorado is on the tight end of this mass balance spectrum. The plan recognizes and calls out that there needs to be. They call that the four chain-of-custody models. Segregated, controlled, blending, mass balance, rolling average, and a mass balance credit. They expressly exclude books and claims. That's the loosest interpretation of how you would apply this accounting of mass balance.

In June of 2025, the plan authorized three allocation procedures for mass balance. Proportional, polymer only, and fuel excluded. The final plan recognizes that proportional, polymer-only, and fuel-excluded were moved into a separate bucket as allocation procedures that require additional processes. Mass balance credit is the only PCR pathway in Colorado that requires third-party certification.

Self-attestation is permitted for other forms of claiming PCR or post-consumer recycled content. Oregon permits controlled blending for batch production and rolling average mass balance for continuous processes, but only at a single site and needs quarterly reconciliation. The FTC green guides are still silent on mass balance. People are relying on these state definitions.

One more thing. ISO published a new mass balance standard with a dedicated book and claim standard under 22095. Basically, they have an amendment to this standard that includes some guidance on mass balance. Another issue is the energy and hazardous waste problem. Chemical recycling has high-temperature conversion, is energy-intensive, and generates residual waste.

California regulatory fight is explicitly calling out that they do not allow for this hazardous waste generation. Part of the definition of a responsible end market is that it cannot make the environmental properties of this product worse. We'll go deeper into that in a minute. The claim problem, chemically recyclable on a package tells a consumer, a buyer, and an increasingly regulator that a pathway exists.

It does not tell them that a facility within economic shipping distance is accepting that material this quarter or that it can be, like, where it is going to be chemically recycled? It's just telling them that it's possible. You need the capacity and the pathway to get it there. I’m going to dive into what EPR is saying about chemical recycling. This is the part that can be the most confusing. There are a lot of headlines. You need to unpack the statute as well as what the articles are saying out there.


Announced facility capacity is just an option. Only operating capacity serves as a real packaging asset.


Navigating Statutory Boundaries Under California EPR

In California, the statute is restrictive. I would say that it leaves like a teeny tiny sliver of a door open. The regulation does say that recycling excludes combustion, incineration, energy generation, and fuel production, except for anaerobic digestion of source-separated organics and other forms of disposal.  To be considered, recycled material must go to a responsible in-market. It does allow for some interpretation of other forms of recycling.

It says that a PRO shall not use its funds to subsidize, incentivize, or otherwise support incineration, engineered municipal solid waste conversion, the production of energy or fuels, or other disposal activities. The money from the PRO cannot go to fund plastics-to-fuel. California's transformation definition captures incineration, pyrolysis, distillation, and biological conversion, other than composting.

It expressly does not include gasification along with composting and biomass conversion. Even inside California's code, pyrolysis and gasification are not necessarily treated the same. The permanent regulations effective in May of 2026. In order to count as recycling, a facility has to give a PRO a description of the technology and how it fits the statutory definition of recycling, the yield of recovered material, and the kilograms of material processed per month for the last twelve months. Kilograms of hazardous waste generated per month for the last twelve months.

Kilograms of acute hazardous waste generated per month for the last twelve months. It must operate consistently with some ISO standards. The PRO has to justify in its plan that the technology does not produce significant hazardous waste, and all of it gets reported annually. That's why I said the door is very slightly open. If it can meet all of those requirements, it's possible that it could be considered. There is a legal battle about some of this language. Environmentalists are saying that it's not stringent enough.

The parts that are in dispute are the language. "The regulation shall include criteria to exclude plastic recycling technologies that produce significant amounts of hazardous waste. The production and management of hazardous waste that is handled and disposed of in compliance with an applicable permit does not present a substantial risk of harm to public health or contamination of the environment." The regulation says that a valid permit means the production of whatever it is is fine.

Hazardous Waste Standards Drive Legal Friction

That was 24 legislators, including Senator Ben Allen, who was one of SB 54's authors, asking that the regulations include criteria to exclude technologies producing significant amounts of hazardous waste and objecting specifically that the draft shifted the standard from production of hazardous waste as the statute requires to its management, and the same comment. The Californians Against Waste said the chemical recycling section had strayed the furthest from the statute and therefore are part of this lawsuit.

Responsible End Markets Set Operational Yield Floors

The practical takeaway here is that California's rules currently leave a very tiny door open, that the statute's own authors say should not be open, and that there's litigation against this. In Oregon, the discipline around chemical recycling is in the definition of in-market. For responsible in-market criteria, compliant, transparent, on-chain of custody, environmentally sound, adequate yields, and as we covered, adequate is around 60% or higher. For now, it's like a self-attestation process.

Eventually, CAA will be required to have a due diligence process around meeting those requirements. There's not like a philosophical debate about what recycling means in the same way that is happening in other states. In Colorado, covered materials cannot be sent waste-to-waste-to-energy. Fuel exclusion is built into the allocation procedures, and there must be third-party certification mandatory for Mass Balance credit.

Washington, the discipline is in the approval, and it's saying that an alternative recycling process is a recycling process occurring other than through purely physical means. It makes counting a permission granted facility by facility, and then it must be renewed annually. A PRO may propose that materials sent to an alternative recycling facility count towards recycling performance targets, but ecology must approve the process.

There are some outlines of what would need to be true for maybe them to approve, like does not include combustion, fuel production, or other forms of energy recovery, protects environment and human health, does not generate hazardous waste, reduces gaps in collection, meets an unmet need, and provides third parties certification of recycled content. Washington puts the generation of hazardous waste in the statute as an approval criterion. That's what the California legislators are asking for. Maine is more about discipline and the permit.

A solid waste processing facility must recycle or process into fuel at least 50% of the waste it accepts through methods other than chemical plastic processing. You must have a permit to do this process, and then chemical plastic processing does not count toward the threshold of recycling. They're not banning it. They're just saying it does not count in the definition of recycling.

Obviously, there's a lot of regulatory language that restricts chemical recycling largely due to the nature that it creates this hazardous waste byproduct. I would be remiss if I didn't also talk about some of the trade-offs that come with chemical recycling. There are some positives, but everyone's hard on this category. At the same time, it seems like a technology that if we do not have it, we will continue to have this subset of material that goes to landfill.

Targeted Chemistry Solves Hard-to-Recycle Polymer Limits

Some of the positive polyesters are chemically designed to come apart. The bond is a genuine weak point within the polyester. There's a genuine weak point. Breaking a polyester back to monomer is not a brute force process. It's targeted chemistry with recoverable yields. It reaches material mechanical recycling. Structurally cannot. There's always going to be some level of yield loss through a mechanical recycling process for various reasons. Some of the options here can take some of that low-value material and still turn it into something else.

It could generally produce food-grade output without decontamination challenges because it's breaking it down to the chemical monomer. Therefore, it's getting rid of anything that might create a contamination issue for food-safe recycled plastic. It creates a landing place for materials that currently have none. If a material is not even thrown in the bin for recycling, in many cases, if it could be collected and captured, it could go through this process because there's no option through mechanical recycling.

This is an example of a topic that has many trade-offs in many different directions. Why am I talking about this if the next episode is to talk about bio-based recycling? Estercycle is depolymerizing bio-based plastic. They are taking methanol and a catalyst and targeting the ester bond in mixed polyesters, including PET and PLA together, including composites and multi-layers, which is a combination that almost nothing else accepts.


Mass balance isn't standardized across states. Colorado requires strict third-party certification for credit.


Estercycle is still at a laboratory scale, but what they're building is the technology and approach to depolymerize these bio-based plastics separately from non-bio-based plastics. It could be seen as sitting in this chemical recycling bucket, but it could also be seen as sitting in this way of handling bio-waste materials. All in all, this whole concept of a new technology in this space is fighting this perception battle because of the hazardous waste material concerns.

At the end of the day, chemical recycling is not necessarily an end-all, be-all solution. We should not necessarily be shifting gears all the way towards chemical recycling. I do think it's a tool in the toolbox to handle some materials that cannot go through the traditional process. It's struggling to be economically viable, as is all recycled material. It's something to pay attention to as this landscape evolves.

In California, the permanent regulations say a valid permit means hazardous waste production is not a substantial risk. The statute says to exclude these types of technologies. It'll be interesting to see where that levels out. In Oregon, responsible in-market verification processes are due by June of 2027. We'll see what that means for this umbrella of technologies. Colorado has this mass balance legislation going on and requirements around disclosures. We'll see where that lands and the impact of that on chemical recycling.

This show is about embracing change. There are a lot of criticisms around this technology. There are a lot of trade-offs and everything. For me, it's about embracing a mindset shift on not just talking about whether or not this technology is good, but whether there is a role for this technology. Can we make it work for certain scenarios where it's needed? Fundamentally, the industry wants to divert more material from landfill. As textile recycling grows in popularity, almost all of it is mixed polymers. It's very hard to recycle something that's mixed without some level of chemical recycling.

Practically, it'll be about whether chemical recycling or advanced recycling can exist without significant hazardous waste byproducts. If it can, or if the hazardous waste can be disposed of properly, is there a place and a role for it to play? The alternative is to keep using mechanical recycling and have a continued yield loss as this stuff goes through the system. Mechanical recycling can only get so efficient. There will always be some level of yield loss.

We'll talk more about Estercycle. There's this whole bio-based polymer concern, or bio-based plastic. It cannot necessarily be compostable. There's actually not a lot of compostable infrastructure out there if it is compostable. There's an opportunity where you're using a renewable feedstock, but you do not have a renewable option for recycling. This change continues to be uncomfortable.

Unpacking where this could be and what role this type of recycling could play, I think, would be good for the future. If you have a more in-depth perception or perspective on chemical recycling that you'd like to share. Again, I'm open to interviewing someone on this topic because I'm not a chemist, and this is just me diving into the available information out there. Thank you for your time. Thank you for joining the show, and talk soon.


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