U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

36–152PDF WASHINGTON : 2019

CLOSING THE LOOP: 

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES 

IN PLASTICS RECYCLING 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND 

TECHNOLOGY 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

APRIL 30, 2019 

Serial No. 116–13 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov 
(II) 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman 

ZOE LOFGREN, California 

DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois 

SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon 

AMI BERA, California, 

Vice Chair 

CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania 

LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas 

HALEY STEVENS, Michigan 

KENDRA HORN, Oklahoma 

MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey 

BRAD SHERMAN, California 

STEVE COHEN, Tennessee 

JERRY MCNERNEY, California 

ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado 

PAUL TONKO, New York 

BILL FOSTER, Illinois 

DON BEYER, Virginia 

CHARLIE CRIST, Florida 

SEAN CASTEN, Illinois 

KATIE HILL, California 

BEN MCADAMS, Utah 

JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia 

FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma, 

Ranking Member 

MO BROOKS, Alabama 

BILL POSEY, Florida 

RANDY WEBER, Texas 

BRIAN BABIN, Texas 

ANDY BIGGS, Arizona 

ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas 

RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina 

MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas 

TROY BALDERSON, Ohio 

PETE OLSON, Texas 

ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio 

MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida 

JIM BAIRD, Indiana 

JAIME HERRERA BEUTLER, Washington 

JENNIFFER GONZA ́ LEZ-COLO ́ N, Puerto 

Rico 

VACANCY 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY

HON. HALEY STEVENS, Michigan, Chairwoman 

DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois 

MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey 

BRAD SHERMAN, California 

PAUL TONKO, New York 

BEN MCADAMS, Utah 

STEVE COHEN, Tennessee 

BILL FOSTER, Illinois 

JIM BAIRD, Indiana, Ranking Member 

ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas 

TROY BALDERSON, Ohio 

ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio 

JAIME HERRERA BEUTLER, Washington 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

April 30, 2019 

Page 

Hearing Charter ...................................................................................................... 2 

Opening Statements 

Statement by Representative Haley Stevens, Chairwoman, Subcommittee on 

Research and Technology, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, 

U.S. House of Representatives ............................................................................ 8 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 10 

Statement by Representative Jim Baird, Ranking Member, Subcommittee 

on Research and Technology, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, 

U.S. House of Representatives ............................................................................ 12 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 13 

Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives .... 15 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 16 

Written statement by Representative Daniel Lipinski, Committee on Science, 

Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives .................................... 19 

Written statement by Representative Suzanne Bonamici, Committee on 

Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ..................... 26 

Witnesses: 

Mr. Paul Sincock, City Manager, City of Plymouth, Michigan 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 29 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 31 

Dr. Govind Menon, Director, School of Science and Technology, and Chair, 

Department of Physics and Chemistry, Troy University 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 40 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 42 

Dr. Gregg Beckham, Senior Research Fellow, National Renewable Energy 

Laboratory 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 58 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 61 

Mr. Tim Boven, Recycling Commercial Director, Packaging and Specialty 

Plastics, Dow 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 69 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 71 

Discussion ................................................................................................................. 80 

Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions 

Dr. Govind Menon, Director, School of Science and Technology, and Chair, 

Department of Physics and Chemistry, Troy University .................................. 98 

Dr. Gregg Beckham, Senior Research Fellow, National Renewable Energy 

Laboratory ............................................................................................................ 99 

Mr. Tim Boven, Recycling Commercial Director, Packaging and Specialty 

Plastics, Dow ........................................................................................................ 105 
Page

IV 

Appendix II: Additional Material for the Record 

Letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler submitted by Representative 

Haley Stevens, Chairwoman, Subcommittee on Research and Technology, 

Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ....................................................................................................................... 108 

Letters of support submitted by Representative Jim Baird, Ranking Member, 

Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science, Space, 

and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ............................................... 110 
(1) 

CLOSING THE LOOP: 

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES 

IN PLASTICS RECYCLING 

TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 2019 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY, 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY, 

Washington, D.C. 

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:20 p.m., in room 

2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Haley Stevens 

[Chairwoman of the Subcommittee] presiding. 
2 

PURPOSE 

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH & TECHNOLOGY 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

HEARING CHARTER 

Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling 

Tuesday. April30, 2019 

2:00p.m. 4:00p.m. 

2318 Rayburn House Office Building 

On Tuesday, Apri130, 2019. the Subcommittee on Research and Technology of the U.S. House 

of Representatives Committee on Science, Space. and Technology will hold a hearing titled, 

"Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling." The purpose of this hearing 

is to examine plastics recycling challenges in the United States and discuss new and emerging 

technologies to reduce the lifecyclc environmental impact of plastic. 

WITNESSES 

• Mr. Paul Sincock, City Manager, City of Plymouth, Michigan 

• Dr. Govind Menon. Director, School of Science and Technology, Chair, Department of 

Physics and Chemistry, Troy University 

• Dr. Gregg Beckham, Senior Research Fellow, National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

• Mr. Tim Boven, Recycling Commercial Director, Packaging & Specialty Plastics. Dow 

0VERARCHING QUESTIONS 

• What is the status of plastics recycling in the U.S.? What are the current and long-term 

challenges to meeting the demand for plastics recycling and reducing the environmental 

impact of plastics? 

• What research and development is needed to advance innovations in plastics recycling at 

different stages along the lifccycle of the plastics material? What new materials. 

processes and other technologies are being explored? What standards are needed to 

advance innovation and grow the U.S. industry? 

• What is the role offederal science agencies in supporting research and development in 

plastics recycling? What is the role of the private sector? How can federal agencies best 

partner with the private sector to advance innovations in plastics recycling to grow the 

U.S. industry and reduce the environmental impact? 

Page 1 of6 
3 

U.S. Plastic Recycling - General History and Overview 

The three word mantra "Reduce. Reuse. Recycle." with the accompanying green-arrowed 

triangle, arose from the environmental movement of the 1970s and is still in use today. The 

Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of']976 included authorization to promote a national 

research and development program for new and improved methods of collection, separation, 

recovery, and recycling of solid wastes. This national effort to recover valuable petroleum-based 

resources that were filling landfills drove the growth of the U.S. plastics recycling industry in the 

1980s, for both post-consumer and post-industrial plastics. The most recent data from the 

Environmental Protection Agency shows that the recycling industry overall was responsible for 

757,000 jobs, $36.6 billion in wages, and $6.7 billion in tax revenues in 2007. 1 

The OECD estimates that global production of plastic has increased from two million tons of 

plastic per year in 1950 to 400 million tons per year today.2 Of the 5.9 million pounds of 

polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles sold in the U.S. market in 2017, 29.2 percent were 

collected through recycling programs3 While this hearing will focus on technology's role in 

plastics recycling, there are several factors driving national discussions about plastics recycling. 

As the U.S. recycling market was growing, the U.S. recycling infrastructure did not keep pace 

with domestic demand. As a result, China's steadily growing recycling industry became a 

competitive market for post-consumer plastics from the U.S. For more than two decades, the 

U.S. and other developed nations sold and exported I 06 million metric tons of recyclable plastics 

to China.4 In 2018, China implemented a policy to prohibit the purchase of most U.S. plastics 

collected for recycling because of contamination levels, and some say because China wants to 

build its own raw materials market. In addition, plastics recycling can be a labor and capitalintensive industry in which the resulting products may be more expensive. Therefore, when oil 

prices are low, making plastics from virgin resin is more economically efficient than using 

recycled content. 

Many American communities have been recycling for decades. Others never implemented 

recycling. Now, with China's ban in effect, some communities that once recycled don't have 

access to an affordable facility that will purchase and process their items collected for recycling. 

Therefore, more and more communities are sending recyclable items to landfills or incinerators 

1 2016 Recycling Economic Information Report (REI).!J!!ru;.:i/www.epa.gov/smm/rccycling-economic-information-

.r~j~r~ 

2 OECD, Improving Markets for Recycled Plastics: Trends, Prospects and Policy Responses. 

2018. http://www.oecd.org/env/waste/improving-markets-for-recycled-plastics-978926430 1 0 16-cn.htm 3 National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR) and Association of Plastic Recyclers Report on 

Postconsumer PET Container Recycling Activity in 2017. 

https://plasticsrecyc ling.org/images/pdf/resources/rcports/Rate-!l&pQrts/Reports-on-Postconsumer· PET -ContainerRecycling-Activity/ APR NAPCOR 20 17RateReport FINAL.pdf 4 Watson, Sara Kiley, "China Has Refused to Recycle The West's Plastics. What Now?," NPR, June 28, 2018. 

https://www. npr.org/ sections/ goatsandsoda/20 !8/06/28/62397293 7/ch ina -has-refused-to-recyc.Je-the-wests-plasticswhat-now 

Page2 of6 
4 

as a less expensive means for disposal. Today, some estimates show that 40 percent of 

Americans do not have access to recycling, 5 others report that 52 percent of Americans don't feel 

that they have access to recycling, 6 and yet others find the opposite - that 94 percent of the U.S. 

population has some type of recycling program available to them. 7 In addition, of the 8.3 billion 

metric tons of plastic ever produced globally, 6.3 billion metric tons has become plastic waste, 

and of that, only nine percent has been recycled. Data on plastics recycling by country is limited, 

but according to the best available data, the U.S. recycles only 9 percent of its plastic, compared 

to 25 percent in China and 30 percent in Europe. 8 

Current Recycling Processes and Challenges 

For those living in communities with recycling programs, how to recycle and what can be 

recycled are decisions made on a municipality by municipality basis with no national guidelines. 

Early recycling procedures in many cities required residents to sort glass, newspaper. cardboard, 

plastics, metals and so on in different curbside bins or at a recycling facility. Later, many cities 

adopted '"single stream'· recycling, in which all recyclable items go in one large curbside bin. 

This was done in an effort to both increase recycling rates and lower collection costs for cities 

facing tight budgets. Cities typically contract with a hauler to truck these items to mostly 

privately owned materials recovery facilities (MRFs) that sort all of the collected items 

manually, with an optical sorter machine, or both. MRFs may further sort plastics by type of 

plastic, for example water and soda bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Once 

sorted, the MRFs contigure these items into bales to be sold and shipped to a recycler, domestic 

or foreign. Once at the recycler, items may be undergo a second sort by a number of factors 

including type of plastic or color, then they are washed, shredded into flakes, and melted into 

pellets that can be extruded to form a new item. 

A high-quality sorting process that produces a clean bale of plastic is a meticulous process. Some 

plastics, such as PET, can be tinted many colors that produce a green or dark colored resin when 

mixed together. There arc some low-value applications, such as carpet backing, that can utilize 

the resin resulting from a mixed PET bale. This is known as "downcycling." Food quality 

packing, for example a clear plastic bottle from recycled materials, requires a much more 

rigorous sorting process and better grade of resin. 

1 Peters, Adele, "All the Ways Recycling is Broken- And How to Fix Them," Fast Company, April 4, 2019. 

https://recyclingpartnership.org/article-all-the-ways-recycling-is-broken-and-how-to-fix-them/ 

6 Maile, Kelly, ''Americans Could Know More About Recycling," Recycling Today, December 21,2018. 

https://www .recycl inctoday .com/ artie le/recyc I ing -partnership-surveys-residents-about-recycling-20 18/ 7 Desilver, Drew, "Perceptions and Realities of Recycling Vary Widely From Place to Place, Pew Research Center, 

October 7, 20 16. https:/ /www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/20 1611 0/07/perceptions-and-re.alities-of-recycling-varywidely-trom-place-to-place/ 

8

Geyer, R., Jambeck, J. R., & Law, K.L., "Production, Use, and Fate of All Plastics Ever Made," Science Advances, 

2017. 

Page 3 of6 
5 

Plastics recycling is a relatively new industry compared to mature recycling processes of other 

materials, such as metals, which have high rates of recycling, Plastics recycling faces unique 

challenges that other materials do not A significant amount of post-consumer plastics are food 

packaging materials that may not have been cleaned thoroughly before being placed into a 

recycling bin. If a handler or a machine at a MRF does not remove containers with food residue 

or an unemptied soda bottle, for example, it may contaminate a whole bale which then goes to a 

landfill. Additionally, while more items arc collected in single-stream curbside recycling bins, 

fewer items are actually being recycled because people are placing items in their bins that they 

hope are recyclable but are not, including such items as bowling balls and blenders, 

Unfortunately, these are often items that the MRF is not able to sort out or items that damage the 

MRFs equipment. Many of these bales also end up being sent to the landfill, recyclables and all. 

The recycler that is purchasing the material makes the determination of the level of 

contamination they will accept in a bale. A rejected bale means lost transportation costs to the 

MRF, which is one of the biggest expenses in recycling. 

Another significant source of contamination is mixed plastics. Some recyclers only process one 

or two types of resin. Therefore, a bale that is supposed to be all PET could be rejected if it is 

mingled with some other type of plastic in the bale, Prior to China's ban on accepting U.S. postconsumer recycled plastic, a handful of MRFs had advanced facilities and practices to produce 

high-quality bales. Since the ban, more U.S. MRFs have upgraded their equipment and processes 

to more thoroughly sort out contaminated materials. However, they remain a tiny fraction of all 

MRFs in the nation. 

Types of Plastic 

Different types of resin are commonly identified on packaging by a number 1 through 7 in a 

triangle made of three arrows. These resin identification codes (R!Cs) originated in the late 

1980s from ASTM and the Plastic Industry Association's predecessor. They were meant to help 

recyclers sort different types of resin, but today, consumers have started relying on these RICs to 

identify whether an item is recyclable. However, the question may not be whether the item is 

recyclable but whether the local facility is able to recycle that item. The RJC is an identifier of 

the general chemical composition of a product- e.g. "1" identifies PET, "2" identifies HighDensity Polyethylene (HDPE) used in products including milk and laundry detergent bottles, "3" 

identifies Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) used in products including shrink wrap and construction 

pipes, and so on.9 R!Cs do not necessarily identify the exact chemical composition of a product. 

Manufacturers of two different brands may design similar packaging with the same RIC, but 

each container or package may have a slightly different composition. While products with RJCs 

9 https://plastics.americanchemistry.com/Piastic-Resin-Cgdes-PDF/ 

Page4of6 
6 

I, 2, and 5 have established markets for recycling, there are no national standards for processing 

plastic recycling. 

One common technology used for sorting plastics is an optical scan using infrared light to detect 

what an item is and its chemical composition. While these technologies are working today, 

advanced screening technologies are needed because manufacturers are increasingly making 

resins using many different chemical compositions. Additionally, many packaging containers are 

made of multiple layers of different types of resin. Advanced processing and sorting is needed to 

better separate plastics for recycling. There are plastics that cannot be mixed together in a 

crusher or melted down together because their chemical make-up is so different that they will not 

mix, for example polystyrene and nylon, or because it could cause a chemical reaction or 

explosion. 

Technology and standards are needed at different stages oft he plastics recycling ecosystem. In 

September 2018, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded a $3.2 

million grant to fund the Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences being established at 

Troy University. The Center will focus on polymer and polymer recycling research in areas 

including analysis, processing, and testing. This Center's research will help support standards 

development for key areas. The FY 2020 President's Budget request would eliminate support for 

this program. In addition to NIST, another federal agency supporting plastics recycling research 

is the Department of Energy (DOE) through its funding of the Reducing EMbodied-Energy And 

Decreasing Emissions (REMADE) Institute, part of the Manufacturing USA® network. DOE 

also funds basic and applied research in plastics recycling and bioplastics at universities and 

national laboratories. 

Mechanical Recycling 

Most recycling today is done through a process of mechanical recycling. This process can 

involve sorting, cleaning, cutting, melting and compressing post-consumer and post-industrial 

plastics into a raw material for making a new product. Some infrastructure is decades old and 

was not built with the intention of processing today's volumes and types of resin-based products. 

For example, plastic grocery bags and other films are recyclable, but they have to be sent to a 

specialized facility and are typically not allowed in curbside recycling. Many well intentioned 

people throw these bags in their bins anyway. A collaborative industry effort is funding a pilot 

project in Pennsylvania to be able to sort films from other recyclables in curbside bins. 

Chemical Recycling 

Chemical recycling, or depolymerization, breaks down a polymer to its building blocks so that 

the quality is similar to virgin resin that may be used for food packaging or other high-value uses 

known as upcycling. This is an important research area because more and more items arc made 

Page 5 of6 
7 

from two or more different types of resins, including some food packaging, shipping envelopes, 

and others products. Chemical recycling enables recyclers to extrude each type of polymer from 

an item or introduce an clement that will make the resins compatible for combined recycling. 

Additionally, chemical recycling may remove dyes from colored packaging, creating another 

way to achieve a food quality, clear resin. 

Bioplastics 

The National Science Foundation, Department of Agriculture, DOE, and other federal agencies 

support biobased plastics research. Bioplastics offer a non-petroleum based plastic alternative for 

some applications, such as food films. More research is needed on biodegradability and end of 

life issues for bioplastics, as well as how they would be incorporated into existing recycling 

infrastructure. 

Other Issues 

Data and Common Definitions- More and better quality data is needed regarding plastic 

recycling. Information is needed regarding what types of plastic are being manufactured, what 

types of products can be recycled, and how much recycling is actually taking place. In addition, 

there is no agreement on what the definition of recycling is for the purposes of data collection 

and analysis, including whether we should count items collected for recycling but are ultimately 

disposed of in a landfill or incinerated. 

Public Education- More efforts are needed to clarify what can be recycled by consumers and 

how to disseminate this information most effectively. Municipal recycling policies vary from 

city to city and depend on the availability and affordability of a MRF that can properly sort 

recyclables; however, more research, development and dissemination of broadly applicable best 

practices could help address the public education challenges for plastics recycling. 

Page6of6 
8 

Chairwoman STEVENS. This hearing will come to order. Without 

objection, the Chair is authorized to declare recess at any time. 

Good afternoon, and welcome to this hearing to review the State 

of plastics recycling technology in the United States. A warm welcome as well to our distinguished group of witnesses. This is going 

to be an informative and engaging panel, and I am looking forward 

to hearing your testimony. I’m also particularly excited to welcome 

Mr. Paul Sincock, a local leader from a city in my district, Michigan’s 11th District, who has worked for the city of Plymouth for 

over 40 years. How special to have your leadership from southeastern Michigan here with us in the United States capital. 

It has been a decade since the Science Committee last held a 

hearing on recycling, and the challenges have only grown. During 

this hearing, we will examine recycling technologies and the technology gaps that prevent more of our plastics from being recycled, 

especially in light of China’s new policy to ban the import of the 

most postconsumer recycled—recyclable materials, including plastics, which the U.S. and other developing countries have been shipping there for the past 25 years. While some businesses were selling China clean and well-sorted plastics, others were not. This was 

cited as a main reason for the ban. 

As we’ll hear from Mr. Sincock, one of the things I’ve heard from 

local leaders in my district are the challenges they are facing in 

maintaining their recycling programs. As waste management companies are no longer able to sell recyclables to China, they are driving up their pricing to recoup costs, costs that fall squarely on our 

municipalities and our taxpayers. 

In many cases, U.S. cities are being forced to cut, unfortunately, 

longstanding recycling programs and are instead incinerating 

recyclables or leaving them in landfills, releasing dangerous emissions. Americans who are trying to do the right thing—our consumers—for our environment, are left unaware that their efforts 

are for naught. 

Yesterday, I wrote a letter to EPA (Environmental Protection 

Agency) Administrator Andrew Wheeler to express my deep concern that the Federal Government is not doing more to buildup our 

own recycling and waste management infrastructure to help cities 

and States with this newfound burden. I would like to at this time 

submit the letter for the record, without objection. 

Plastic, most of which takes hundreds of years to break down 

naturally, has been a particular problem. We’re seeing record 

amounts of plastic in our water system, including in our Great 

Lakes, because we don’t have the process to take on the volumes 

of waste that we are creating. 

Plastic is unquestionably convenient, and global production of 

plastic has soared from 2 million tons per year in 1950 to 400 million tons today. Most of our current U.S. recycling infrastructure 

is decades old and not built to process the amounts of plastic we 

have today. 

Likewise, our recycling policies haven’t kept pace with today’s 

plastic use. The last comprehensive Federal law to improve recycling is the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, before 

I was born. The most recent publicly available EPA data on the 

economic impact of the recycling industry is from 2007. 
9 

The Department of Commerce never acted on a 2007 GAO (Government Accountability Office) recommendation for the agency to 

develop a strategy to stimulate the development of domestic recycling markets. Instead, Commerce activity—or actively sought to 

build international markets. As a result, the U.S. failed to invest 

in technology and materials to make the recycling process more efficient. 

This is a familiar story about crumbling infrastructure, lost industrial capacity, and lack of leadership. However, China’s new policy, while in the short term puts us in crisis mode, should also be 

seen as an opportunity for the longer term, and we need to start 

now. 

Our response should be to reduce and reuse more, but it is not 

realistic to think we can give up disposable plastic altogether. We 

urgently need a national strategy to build out our country’s recycling infrastructure. It is our opportunity to seize. At this time, we 

must invest in research and development of sustainable materials 

and processes, as well as in standards. 

A concerted effort will make recycling more cost-effective for our 

local governments, while making it easier for the public to participate. In doing so, we can inspire a sustainable manufacturing environment, and above all, reduce emissions to keep our planet 

healthy. 

I greatly look forward to today’s testimony and discussion. I hope 

it is just the beginning of this Committee’s efforts to contribute to 

smart solutions in our Nation’s recycling challenges. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Stevens follows:] 
10 

U.S. HOUSE OF COMM ON 

SCIENCE, SPACE, & TECHNOLOGY 

Opening Statement 

Chairwoman Haley Stevens (D-MI) 

oftbe Subcommittee ou Research aud Technology 

Subcommittee on Research and Technology Hearing: 

Closing rhe Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling 

April 30, 2019 

Good afternoon and welcome to this hearing to review the state of plastics recycling technology 

in the United States. A warm welcome as well to our distinguished group of witnesses. This is 

going to be an informative and engaging panel and I am looking forward to hearing your 

testimony. I'm particularly excited to welcome Mr. Paul Sincock, a local leader !rom a city in 

my district, who has worked for the city of Plymouth for over 40 years. 

It has been a decade since the Science Committee last held a hearing on recycling and the 

challenges have only grown. During this hearing, we will examine recycling technologies and 

the technology gaps that prevent more of our plastics from heing recycled, especially in light of 

China's new policy to ban the import of most postconsumer recyclable materials, including 

plastics, which the U.S. and other developing countries have been shipping there for the past 25 

years. While some businesses were selling China clean and well sorted plastics, others were not. 

This was cited as a main reason for the ban. 

As we'll hear from Mr. Sincock, one of the things ['ve heard about !rom local leaders in my 

district are the challenges they're facing in maintaining their recycling programs. As waste 

management companies are no longer able to sell recyclables to China, they are driving up their 

pricing to recoup costs- costs that fall squarely on our municipalities. 

In many eases, U.S. cities are being forced to cut longstanding recycling programs and are 

instead incinerating recyclables or leaving them in landfills, releasing dangerous emissions. 

Americans who are trying to do the right thing for our environment are left unaware that their 

efforts are for naught. 

Last week, I wrote a letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to express my deep concern 

that the federal government is not doing more to build up our own recycling and waste 

management infrastructure to help cities and states with this burden. I would like to submit this 

letter for the record. 

Plastic, most of which takes hundreds of years to break down naturally, has been a particular 

problem. We're seeing record amounts of plastic in our water system, including the Great Lakes, 

because we don't have the capacity to process the volumes of waste we are creating. 
11 

Plastic is unquestionably convenient, and global production of plastic has soared from 2 million 

tons per year in 1950 to 400 million tons today. Most of our current U.S. recycling infrastructure 

is decades old and not built to process the amounts of plastic we have today. 

Likewise, our recycling policies haven't kept pace with today's plastic use. The last 

comprehensive Federal law to improve recycling is the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act 

of 1976. The most recent publicly available EPA data on the economic impact of the recycling 

industry is from 2007. 

The Department of Commerce never acted on a 2007 GAO recommendation for the agency to 

develop a strategy to stimulate the development of domestic recycling markets. Instead, 

Commerce actively sought to build international markets. As a result, the U.S. failed to invest in 

technology and materials to make the recycling process more efficient. 

This is a familiar story about crumbling infrastructure, lost industrial capacity, and lack of 

leadership. However, China's new policy, while in the short term puts us in crisis mode, should 

also be seen as an opportunity for the longer term. And we need to start now. 

Our first response should be to reduce and reuse more. But it is not realistic to think we can give 

up disposable plastic altogether. We urgently need a national strategy to build out our country's 

recycling infrastructure. At the same time, we must invest in research and development of 

sustainable materials and processes as well as in standards. 

A concerted effort will make recycling more cost-effective for our local governments, while 

making it easier for the public to participate. In doing so, we can inspire a sustainable 

manufacturing environment, and above all, reduce emissions to save our earth. 

I look forward to today's testimony and discussion.! hope it is just the beginning of this 

Committee's efforts to contribute to smart solutions to our nation's recycling challenges. 

Thank you. 
12 

Chairwoman STEVENS. And the Chair now recognizes Mr. Baird 

for an opening statement. 

Mr. BAIRD. Well, good afternoon, Chairwoman Stevens, and I appreciate all of you being here with us to testify this afternoon, and 

I really appreciate the opportunity to have this hearing about 

Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling. 

In the 20th century, American scientists led the invention of synthetic plastic materials. These discoveries were transformative. For 

the first time human manufacturing was not constrained by the 

limits of nature. The creation of plastic also made material wealth 

more widespread and obtainable. 

Now in the 21st century, we must lead again in the development 

of new sustainable materials and recycling technologies. Investments in these key areas will ensure a better world for our children 

and our grandchildren. 

The plastics industry is one of the largest manufacturing sectors 

in the United States. The industry accounted for more than $430 

billion in shipments and 989,000 jobs in 2017. My home State of 

Indiana has the highest concentration of plastics industry workers 

in the country, producing nearly $20 billion in shipments. We have 

an opportunity to leverage that expertise to develop a new circular 

economy for the United States, an economy that produces, recycles, 

and reuses materials to reduce cost and waste. 

We have witnesses today from government, academia, and industry who are working together on those very things to be able to advance them. I look forward to learning from the recycling challenges faced by local communities and the new solutions, including 

chemical recycling and applying robotics and artificial intelligence 

to maintain sorting. Innovation in these areas will help the environment and the U.S. economy. 

We all want clean rivers, lakes, oceans, and healthier communities. What my constituents don’t want are regulations that will 

raise the cost of energy, food production, construction, and technology. Costly regulations, like those proposed in the Green New 

Deal, would hurt middle- and working-class Americans the most. 

One of the wonderful things about the Science Committee is that 

we are not a regulatory committee. We are the committee of the 

future, looking to innovation and to solve problems. I’m looking forward to hearing from those potential solutions today for recycling 

plastic. 

Thank you, Madam Chair, I yield back. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Baird follows:] 
13 

COMMITIEEON 

SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

REPUBLICANS Frank Lucas. Ranking Member 

Opening Statement of Research and Technology Subcommittee Ranking 

Member Jim Baird, PhD 

Subcommittee on Research & Technology Hearing- Closing the Loop: Emerging 

Technologies in Plastics Recycling 

Good morning Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you for convening today's hearing on Emerging 

Technologies in Plastics Recycling. 

In the 20th Century, American scientists led the invention of synthetic plastic materials. These 

discoveries were transformative. For the first time human manufacturing was not constrained 

by the limits of nature. 

The creation of plastic also made material wealth more widespread and obtainable. 

Now in the 21st Century. we must lead again in the development of new sustainable materials 

and recycling technologies. Investments in these key areas will ensure a better world for our 

children and grandchildren. 

The plastics industry is one of the largest manufacturing sectors in the United States. The 

industry accounted for more than $430 billion in shipments and 989,000 jobs in 2017. 

My home state of Indiana has the highest concentration of plastics industry workers in the 

country, producing nearly $20 billion in shipments. We have an opportunity to leverage that 

expertise to develop a new circular economy for the United States-- an economy that 

produces, recycles, and reuses materials to reduce cost and waste. 

We have witnesses today from government. academia and industry who are working together 

on those advances. I look forward to learning more about the recycling challenges faced by 

local communities. and new solutions including chemical recycling and applying robotics and 

artificial intelligence to material sorting. Innovation in these areas will help the environment 

and the U.S. economy. 

We all want clean rivers, lakes and oceans and healthier communities. What my constituents 

don't want are regulations that would raise the cost of energy, food production, construction, 

and technology. 
14 

Costly regulations, like those proposed in the Green New Deal, would hurt middle- and 

working-class Americans the most. 

One of the wonderful things about the Science Committee is that we are not a regulatory 

committee. We are the committee of the future, looking to innovation to solve problems. 

I'm looking forward to hearing some of those potential solutions today for recycling plastic. 

Thank you Madam Chair, I yield back. 
15 

Chairwoman STEVENS. The Chair now recognizes the Chairwoman of the Full Committee, Ms. Johnson, for an opening statement. 

Chairwoman JOHNSON. Thank you very much, Madam Chairwoman, and good afternoon to all. I want to thank you and the 

Ranking Member for putting together this panel to draw attention 

to the important issue before us. And welcome to our witnesses. 

Plastics have become fundamental to almost every aspect of our 

lives, from food storage to 3-D printing technology, and have enabled us to make great technological advances. With this progress, 

however, comes a cost. Some estimates suggest that all Americans 

dispose of 22 million tons of products that could have been recycled 

every year. We produce far more plastic than we can properly recycle, domestically and internationally. 

The extent of plastics pollution is becoming ever more apparent 

and more alarming. Just last week, a study found that over 90 percent of the river flood plains in Switzerland, a country with one of 

the highest recycling rates in the world, were contaminated with 

microplastics. It is not just mountains and the soil which are subject to plastic contamination. We have all seen pictures of large 

masses of plastics floating in the oceans and washing up on the 

beaches around the world. A study in 2015 estimated that 8 million 

metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year. By some estimates, by mid-century, the oceans will contain more plastic waste 

than fish, ton-for-ton. While there is little research to date, we 

should be very concerned about the impact on human health from 

all of this microplastic in our environment and our food chain. 

Complicating the challenge is China’s ban on our most imported 

recyclables. As a matter of fact, it’s put a couple of businesses in 

my district out of business. Too many American communities are 

facing tough decisions about whether they will need to cut back on 

what they recycle or even whether they can recycle at all. 

The news is not all bleak, however. There are a number of promising new technologies and innovations across all steps of the recycling pathway from collection to repurposing. These technologies 

are being developed through collaborations that span the lifecycle 

of the material and include both public and private partners. The 

goals of these efforts are to increase the efficiency and availability 

of recycling, repurpose more recycled plastics into high-value products, and ultimately, reduce the impact on the environment and 

human health. These are important efforts with a critical role for 

many of our Federal science agencies, as we will hear today. 

In conclusion, I want to echo a comment by Chairwoman Stevens. As we look to improve recycling technologies, we must step 

up our efforts to reduce and reuse plastics through better technology and smarter incentives and policies. 

I look forward to today’s discussion. I yield back the balance of 

my time. 

[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:] 
16 

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES COMMITTEE ON 

SCIENCE, SPACE, & TECHNOLOGY 

Opening Statement 

Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) 

Subcommittee on Research and Technology Hearing: 

Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling 

April30, 2019 

Good Afternoon, and thank you, Madam Chairwoman for holding this hearing. I want to thank 

you and the Ranking Member for putting together this panel to draw attention to this important 

issue. Welcome also to our witnesses, and thank you all for being here with us today. 

Plastics have become fundamental to almost all aspects of our lives, from food storage to 3-D 

printing technology, and have enabled us to make great technological advances. With this 

progress, however, comes a cost. Some estimates suggest that Americans dispose of 22 million 

tons of products that could have been recycled every year. We produce far more plastic than we 

can properly recycle, domestically and internationally. 

The extent of plastics pollution is becoming ever more apparent and more alarming. Just last 

week, a study found that over 90% of the river flood plains in Switzerland, a country with one of 

the highest recycling rates in the world, were contaminated with microplastics. It is not just 

mountains and soil which are subject to plastics contamination. We have all seen pictures of 

large masses of plastics floating in the oceans and washing up on beaches around the world. A 

study in 2015 estimated that 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year. By 

some estimates, by mid-century, the oceans will contain more plastic waste than fish, ton-for-ton. 

While there is little research to date, we should be very concerned about the impact on human 

health of all of this microplastic in our environment and our food chain. 

Complicating this challenge is China's ban on most imported recyclables. Too many American 

communities are facing tough decisions about whether they will need to cut back on what they 

recycle or even whether they can recycle at all. 

The news is not all bleak, however. There are a number of promising new technologies and 

innovations across all steps of the recycling pathway from collection to repurposing. These 

technologies are being developed through collaborations that span the lifecycle of the material 

and include both public and private partners. The goals of these efforts are to increase the 

efficiency and availability of recycling, repurpose more recycled plastics into high value 

products, and ultimately, reduce the impact on the environment and human health. These are 

important efforts with a critical role for many of our Federal science agencies, as we will hear 

today. 
17 

In conclusion, I want to echo a comment by Chairwoman Stevens. As we look to improve 

recycling technologies, we must step up our efforts to reduce and reuse plastics through better 

technology and smarter incentives and policies. I look forward to today's discussion and I yield 

back. 
18 

Chairwoman STEVENS. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. 

If there are any other Members who wish to submit additional 

opening statements, your statements will be added to the record at 

this point. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Lipinski follows:] 
19 

DANIEL LIPINSKI 

3r.Jll 0!$Tl«:T,I~l.IN'O!S 

www.llpin~k;.nou~li!.gc.v 

C!ongre9'9' of tbc ~nitd1 ~tates 

~otul't of 1\eprefl'entatibts' 

'Qi~Jia~bin\l!Oll, 1!1€ 20515-1303 

May 13, 2019 

COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATtON 

AND INFRASTRUCTURE 

RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY. RANKING MF.MSER 

Congressman Lipinski Statement for the Record for Subcommittee on Research and Technology 

Hearing "Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling" 

Thank you Chairwoman Stevens and Ranking Member Baird for holding this important hearing 

to examine plastics recycling challenges, and to allow our subcommittee to discuss new and 

emerging technologies to address these challenges. I would also like to thank the witnesses for 

providing their testimony and participating in this discussion. 

I would like to submit the attached statement to the hearing record, highlighting recycling 

innovations by America Styrenics LLC, also known as AmSty, which has a facility in my home 

state of Illinois. AmSty demonstrates how the "Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle" themes discussed 

at this hearing may be incorporated into industry practice. 
20 

~AmSty 

Brad Crocker 

President and Chief 

Executive Officer 

Americas Styrenics LLC 

24 WateJWay Avenue 

Suite 1200 

The Woodlands, TX 77380 

Phone: 832-616-7801 

Assistant: 832-616-7828 

bcrocker@amsty.com 

May8, 2019 

Rep. Haley Stevens, Committee Chair 

US House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Committee 

2318 Rayburn House Office Building 

Forty-five Independence Avenue SW 

Washington, DC 20515 

Dear Ms. Stevens and Distinguished Committee Members, 

I would like to take this opportunity to enter the following information into the 

record of the US House Science, Space, and Technology Committee hearing on 

"Closing the loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recylcing" that took place 

on April 30, 2019. 

AmSty completely supports the waste hierarchy of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, 

Recover, and Dispose. We believe that only by focusing time, resources and 

investment on the first three (Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle), can we minimize 

our dependence on the inherently less sustainable final two (Recover and 

Dispose). As such, I'd like to share our views on the hierarchy as well as several 

sustain ability Innovations taking place at AmSty and throughout the greater 

plastics industry. 

Reduce. Whether a company, an organization or an individual, we should all 

focus on minimizing the amount of material used in our everyday lives. One of 

the most prevalent examples of materials used daily are disposable food service 

items which have become a common and significant part of our routine. These 

items provide great benefits in terms of convenience, hygiene, and reduction in 

food waste, but, when used needlessly and wastefully, pose a significant 

sustain ability risk to society. Reducing both the use ofthese items and the 

amount of materials used in their production is a major focus for both the food 

service and plastics industries. Products made from polystyrene contribute to 

reduced material consumption in a couple of very significant ways. 

The unique nature of polystyrene allows the encapsulation of a surprisingly 

large amount of air within the structure of the packaging to minimize the 

amount of plastic needed to serve its purpose. Consider the foam cup for 

example- its composition is 98% air, requiring significantly less energy and 

water to produce than similar products made from paper. Polystyrene foam 

requires 50% less energy, 30% less water, and 20% less C02 to produce than 

paper product alternatives.IO Additionally, the production of certain paper 

packaging products, such as cups and egg cartons creates 70% more air 

pollution and 80% more greenhouse gases when compared to polystyrene 
21 

counterpartsiHI. Additionally, the fact that a paper sleeve and frequently 

two paper cups are required to keep a hot beverage from burning your hand 

is a surprisingly egregious and unnecessary waste of natural resources. 

Recent AmSty led innovation in polystyrene production and chemistry can 

now significantly decrease the amount of resin needed to make items with 

similar properties to those of higher weight. This "light-weighting" 

breakthrough technology known as PolyRenew"' High Efficiency Resin 

allows everyday items like take-home food containers, meat trays, and 

school lunch trays to use 10 to 15% less material than before with no 

degradation in performance. 

AmSty is serious about reducing the amount of material needed in our everyday 

lives. We continue to invest in technology, resources, and innovation to 

support the first step in the waste hierarchy- Reduce. 

Reuse. AmSty supports replacement of disposable items with reusable items 

where efficient, healthy, and value-adding. Both common sense and numerous 

studies have shown that replacing disposable bottles, containers, and other 

food service items with reusable products significantly reduces litter and has a 

positive effect on reducing marine debris. We do not dispute the sound logic of 

reusable containers; however, we believe that society should remain cautious 

of increased health risk if reusable products are not cleaned and sanitized 

between each use. After all, disposable products were originally created to 

address health and hygiene issues prevalent throughout society. We've all seen 

signs on water coolers requesting users not to fill reusable bottles due to risks 

associated with contamination, health and hygiene. Similarly, reusable straws 

are also susceptible to bacterial growth leading to potential health issues if not 

properly cleaned and sanitized between uses. AmSty has developed a hybrid 

concept that combines the safety and convenience of disposable items with the 

sustainabllity footprint of reusable items. Our PolyUsable"' process assures 

food service items are reused one molecule at a time- reassembled through 

technology in effect recreating the original product. We believe this innovation 

is a significant step forward in waste hierarchy- Reuse. 

Recycle. AmSty's simple mission, to enhance lives through materials and knowhow in a responsible and sustainable manner, requires commitment to 

developing and marketing sustainable products and solutions. We are very 

demanding and don't believe recyclability equals sustain ability unless the 

recycling process is economically viable. Societal expansion and growth 

demand both. Additionally, if society must use disposable items, shouldn't they 

at least be made from the most sustainable, environmentally friendly material 

Page 2 of6 
22 

available? I've outlined several initiatives and innovations currently underway 

demonstrating AmSty's commitment to sustainable recycling of polystyrene. 

• AmSty has recently formed a joint venture called Regenyx to develop, 

promote and operate technology converting discarded polystyrene products 

into liquid feedstock that can be made back into pure, FDA-approved 

foodservice products without any loss of quality. Regenyx, established 

earlier this year, assumed operations of the world's largest plastics to 

feedstock recycling facility In Tigard, Oregon, previously owned by Agilyx. 

This innovative company is already using polystyrene waste collected from 

post-consumer Material Recovery Facilities (MRF), drop-offs, and industrial 

take-back programs as feedstock, proving polystyrene can be economically 

recycled in a carbon-durable loop. This circular, PolyUsable"', approach Is 

made possible by polystyrene's unique polymer structure. Polystyrene 

requires a relatively low amount of energy, compared to other plastics, to 

"unzip" the polymer, transforming it back into its basic styrene form. Once 

the styrene is purified, it can be easily repolymerized back into clean, 

functional, and cost-effective polystyrene again and again. This circular 

approach is analogous to the water-cycle where water freezes and melts on 

an infinite basis with no loss in properties. Over time, we believe this 

technology can be applied to other plastic materials and is one of the most 

significant reasons for focusing on the collection of polystyrene waste as 

valuable feedstock, rather than banning it. 

The largest challenge for increasing recycled content and access is economic 

viability of the recycling process. The historic problem with recycled 

products is that they almost always return at a lower value than their 

original use. This loss of value is caused by lower purity, lower quality and 

FDA concerns in food packaging. The PolyUsable"' process uses advanced 

chemical recycling technology to return recycled material back to the value 

chain at the same level from which it started. This effectively eliminates 

access to end-use markets as an obstacle and significantly expands the 

economic reach of recycling. Recycling in this manner Increases recycled 

content and promotes "In-Kind" recycling, making polystyrene single-use 

food service items truly PolyUsable"'. 

As an industry leader, we want to address various facts and misconceptions 

about polystyrene foam. It Is often overlooked that substitute materials for 

polystyrene are no better for the environment and, in many cases, are far 

worse. Consider the paper to-go cup as an example. While the paper 

appears to be recyclable, the cups are lined with low-density polyethylene 

(another type of plastic) to make them water tight. While functional, the 

combination of paper and plastic makes these cups very difficult to recycle. 

Page 3 of6 
23 

Polystyrene foam is highly energy efficient and cost effective - unparalleled 

in its insulatlve properties to reduce food waste. As an example, the 

Baltimore City Council attempted to institute a foam foodservlce ban In June 

2018, which was ultimately vetoed. County Executive Steve Schuh opposed 

the proposed ban citing its impact to school meal programs and the added 

cost to the city school district, "The school system serves millions of trays of 

food. Changing to a new type of food tray would cost an estimated 

$364,000.1111]" 

• There are a variety of reasons why we should work toward recycling of 

plastic materials rather than banning them. Banning one material for 

another simply isn't the best course of action for reducing litter and does 

nothing to bring us closer to a zero-waste goal. The Plastics industry is 

committed to litter and waste reduction, particularly from polystyrene 

products that can be part of the Polyusable"' recycling process. On litter as 

a whole, it is well established that polystyrene products are only a small part 

of the overall problem. Banning polystyrene would have minimal impact, 

not only because of the volumes, but also because difficult to recycle 

materials like plastic-lined paper cups would be substituted into those 

applications. Comprehensive collection and recycling of plastic products is 

the circular solution needed to address the litter and marine debris issue. 

Steven Stein, principal of the Washington-based Environmental Resources 

Group shares some helpful insight into the problem of litter. Here's what 

Stein says in the los Angeles Times [vi: nFoodserv/ce containers made of 

polystyrene are a minor component of litter ... The data I have reviewed from 

L.A. County and nationwide consistently show that litter on our streets and 

trash in our waterways comprise a broad ronge of items representing what 

people typico/ly use in their daily lives. All types of materials are occasionally 

discarded improperly without regard to the impacts." He goes on to say that 

banning foodservice foam containers will not reduce the amount of trash in 

streets and waterways and banning polystyrene will only result in the 

substitution products being discarded in exactly the same manner. Stein 

recommends targeted enforcement of existing litter ordinances by tracking 

how litter ends up in the streets and storm drains to combat litter, rather 

than banning the materials which are littered. A study conducted by the 

Friends of the Los Angeles River confirms these findings. The organization 

sampled trash from the LA. River from 2004-2011 which found that 

foodservice packaging accounted for an average of only 5% of the trash, 

with a few samples ranging slightly higher rv11. Unfortunately, polystyrene 

foam is often perceived as a major component of litter due to its light 

weight and color even though the data does not support that assertion. 

Additional supporting data can also be found in an audit performed in San 

Francisco, examining the litter problem in that city [vuJ. 

Page4of6 
24 

• AmSty supports the bold initiatives recently outlined by the American 

Chemistry Council (ACC) requiring 100% of plastic packaging to be recyclable 

or recoverable by 2030 and 100% of plastic packaging to be re-used, 

recycled or recovered by 2040. These milestones ensure all plastic remains 

sustainable and an important part of the circular economy. Continued 

innovation in process improvement is needed, but even more critical is 

investment in recycling infrastructure to deliver a truly circular solution. We 

believe funding these infrastructure improvements is best handled through 

1) Private-public partnerships where companies buy waste directly from 

municipalities which in turn reinvest the income back into recycling 

infrastructure; 2) Financial initiatives requiring all participants within the 

value chain to contribute to ensuring end-of-life solutions for their products; 

and 3) Increased government investment in recycling infrastructure and 

corresponding tax incentives for companies making sustainability-based 

investments. 

• Last year the ACC reported that 333 chemical industry projects directly 

attributed to shale gas and energy advantage in the US have been 

announced since 2010, cumulatively valued at $202 billion. These massive 

investments in people, processes, and assets require significant process 

efficiency to assure safe and reliable operations. At the same time, the 

industry understands the need to introduce plastic waste as a chemical 

feedstock into these highly efficient, high volume production units. Despite 

these challenges, AmSty is now including plastic waste as feedstock at our 

largest petrochemical facility in St. James, louisiana. Based on the sheer 

magnitude of the petrochemical industry, recycled plastic waste will likely 

only make up a small portion of the feedstock used over the next decade. 

Correspondingly, recycled content in the final product will also remain a 

small portion of the output. To date, it is not yet efficient to segregate 

production between virgin and recycled material at world-scale plants. As 

an example, let's consider a large integrated facility producing 10 billion 

pounds of product. If that facility were to incorporate 100 million pounds 

per year of plastic waste as feedstock, a huge amount bytoday's standard, 

the recycled content of the final product would be just 1%. While any 

amount of recycled content Is a good thing, it is difficult to get brand owners 

and consumers excited about this small of an improvement in sustainability. 

However, if the producer could get credit for the amount of recycled 

material actually produced by appropriately applying a common mass 

balance equation, the producer could theoretically market 100 million 

pounds of 100% recycled content material. This molecular accounting 

system would incent companies to invest in sustainability, allow them to 

continue to run their plants efficiently and safely, while also diverting 

Pages of6 
25 

significant quantities of plastic waste from the landfill. This concept is 

analogous to how consumers choose to purchase sustainable energy off a 

non- segregated electrical grid that uses mass balance to appropriately and 

ethically address the need. Over time, this concept has driven increased 

investment in and consumption of renewable energy without the 

complexity and cost of physically segregating the electrons. 

AmSty and the rest oft he Plastics industry continue to invest billions of dollars 

to make the concepts, options, and processes described above today's reality. 

In our view, no other industry has the resources, knowledge, and economic 

power to fix this global issue, and we take seriously our responsibility to 

improve society both today and in the future through our focus on waste 

hierarchy- Recycle. 

I want to take this opportunity to thank you and the Committee for reviewing 

AmSty's position on how polystyrene and the PolyUsable'" process can 

effectively address waste hierarchy goals and initiatives. We are confident we 

are on the right path to reduce, reuse, and recycle polystyrene, as wefi as other 

plastics, in the most efficient and sustainable manner possible. AmSty remains 

completely committed to our long-term goal that no polystyrene item ever 

needs to be landfilled. 

~------------ President and Chief Executive Officer 

Ulufe Cycle Inventory of Foam Polystyrene, Paper-Based, and PLA Foodservice ProductsFrankl1n Associates, Prairie Village, Kansas, 2011 

2017062S·stortJl!ro!- Steven Stein, Los Angeles, 2017 

Nil Friends of Los Angeles 

Page6 of6 
26 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Bonamici follows:] 

Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici- April 30,2019 

Questions for the Record 

Science, Space, and Technology Research and Technology Subcommittee Hearing 

Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling 

Thank you Chair Stevens and Ranking Member Baird, and thank you to our witnesses for being 

here today. 

Every minute, the equivalent of a garbage truck full of plastic is dumped into our oceans. 

According to the United Nations, that's more than eight million tons a year. Plastic bottles, 

straws, grocery bags, cigarette butts, fishing gear, and abandoned vessels litter the ocean. 

Currents and atmospheric winds carry floatable marine debris. These movements trap items in 

debris accumulation zones, also known as garbage patches. A study published in the journal 

Scientific Reports estimated that the Pacific Garbage Patch is comprised of 1.8 trillion pieces of 

debris. We still don't know how long it takes for plastic to completely biodegrade. Estimates 

range from 450 years to never. 

Marine debris harms our costal economies, endangers marine life, destroys important marine 

habitat, propagates invasive species, and creates hazardous conditions for the maritime industry. 

Tiny pieces of plastic, fiber, fragments, and micro beads also make their way into marine life, 

blocking digestive tracts, altering growth, and in some cases killing animals and marine 

organisms. 

Marine debris is entirely preventable. But we must support responsible disposal practices. As 

Co-Chair of the House Oceans Caucus, last year I worked with my colleague Congressman Don 

Young from Alaska to pass the Save Our Seas Act, a first step to address marine debris. We are 

currently working with our Senate Oceans Caucus colleagues on a Save Our Seas 2.0. 

Question 1: According to a study in Nature Geoscience, earlier this month, researchers in France 

found thousands of microplastic are airborne and may be polluting the air that we breathe. Dr. 

Beckham, in your testimony you discuss the pervasive nature of microplastics in our society, 

from our soil to our food chain. What do we currently know about the effects of microplastics in 

our ecosystem? What research is needed to better understand the consequences for human 

health? 

Question 2: Dr. Beckham, in your testimony you mention that "emissions from plastics 

combustion, beyond carbon dioxide, often contain toxic metals ... causing yet another potential 

environmental cleanup problem while simultaneously adding to the amount of carbon dioxide in 

the atmosphere." How can Congress better support efforts to sustainably break down plastics in 

the recycling process? 
27 

-"""--

April 30, 2019 

The Honorable Haley Stevens 

Chairwoman 

Subcommittee on Research & Technology 

Science, Space, & Technology Committee 

U.S. House of Representatives 

2321 Rayburn H.O.B. 

Washington, DC 20515 

Dear Chairwoman Stevens & Ranking Member Baird: 

The Honorahle Jim Baird 

Ranking Member 

Subcommittee on Research & Technology 

Science, Space. & Technology Committee 

U.S. House of Representatives 

2321 Rayburn H.O.B. 

Washington. DC 20515 

The Portland Cement Association (PCA) is pleased to provide the following statement to the 

Science, Space, & Technology Subcommittee on Research and Technology in support of your 

hearing today, Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling. Our membership 

supports innovative uses for secondary post-industrial, post-commercial, postand other materials, which have tremendous energy 

emissions (GHG) and other ~"'""""'"o, 

disposal of materials that can become health vectors and safety Jisks, conserve natural 

provide low-cost, fuels. 

PCA, founded in 1916, is the premier policy, research, education, and market intelligence 

organization serving America's cement manufacturers. PCA members represent 93 percent of the 

United States' cement production capacity and have facilities in all 50 states. Cement and 

concrete product manufacturing, directly aud indirectly, employs approximately 600,000 people 

in our country, and our collective industries contribute over $100 billion to our economy. 

Portland cement is the fundamental in~o,rredient in concrete. The Association promotes safety, 

sustainability, and innovation in all aspects of constmction, fosters continuous improvement in 

cement manufacturing and distribution, and promotes economic growth and sound inf!-astructurc 

investment 
28 

The cement industry is constrained by legal barriers through the Resource Conservation and 

Recovery Act, the Clean Air Act, as interpreted by the courts, and Environmental Protection Agency 

regulations restricting the use of non-hazardous secondary materials and wastes as fuels. In 2007, the 

DC Circuit Court of Appeals found that facilities combusting solid waste for energy recovery must 

be regulated as solid waste incinerators. In response, the EPA issued regulations attempting to clarify 

when non-hazardous secondary materials would be deemed solid waste when used as fuel for the 

purposes of energy recovery. In theory, the 2011 Non-Hazardous Secondary Materials Rule should 

allow for and encourage secondary materials to be used for energy recovery if they met specific 

legitimacy criteria. In practice, the standards and procedures established under the rule prevent 

significant amounts oflandfilled materials such as plastics, paper, fabrics/fibers, and other secondary 

materials from being used as fuels, despite their demonstrably lower greenhouse gas and other air 

emissions. Today, alternative fuels make up only about 15 percent of the fuel used by domestic 

manufacturers, compared to more than 36 percent in the European Union, including as high as 60 

percent in Germany. 

The cement industry can beneficially reuse the millions of tons of plastics and other landfilled materials 

for energy recovery. The cement industry's use of scrap tires provides an illustrative example for 

beneficially reusing materials traditionally landfilled as fuels. EPA lowered regulatory barriers to using 

scrap tires as fuel helping the industry to increase its use of tire derived fuel (TDF) from 40 million tires 

in 2011 to 60 million tires in 2017. TDF serves as excellent fuel for cement kilns as they have high 

heating value and have demonstrated lower GHG, nitrogen oxide (NOx), sulfur dioxide (S02), and 

particulate matter (PM) emissions than traditional fossil fuels. There is a similar opportunity to reuse the 

millions of tons of plastics discarded into landfills, including the marine debris plastics that could further 

reduce GHG and other air emissions, promote energy security, and ensure cleaner waters. 

Considering the Committee's interest in addressing climate change, we encourage further exploration into 

ways the EPA can lower barriers for manufacturers to increase their use of alternative fuels. Such actions 

by Congress would permit: 

• beneficial reuse landfilled materials for energy recovery, 

• reduced reliance on traditional fossil fuels, 

• benefit the environment and public health through lower GHG and air emissions, and 

• a decrease in public health and vector risks. 

Thank you for your consideration of our comments. 

Sincerely, 

Rachel Derby 

Vice-President, Government Affairs 

Portland Cement Association 
29 

Chairwoman STEVENS. At this time, I would like to introduce our 

witnesses. Our first witness is Mr. Paul Sincock. Mr. Sincock is the 

City Manager for the city of Plymouth, Michigan, located in western Wayne County, Michigan. In this role, Mr. Sincock is the Chief 

Administrative Officer of the city and is in charge of the day-to-day 

operations of the city and directs the city’s efforts on recycling. Mr. 

Sincock also took the lead in implementing a pay-as-you-throw 

trash disposal system in the city and is a regular speaker on the 

topic of solid waste and recycling programs. He is also one of the 

first people who brought this problem to my attention. 

Our next witness is Dr. Govind Menon. Dr. Menon is the Founding Director of the School of Science and Technology and the Chair 

of the Department of Chemistry and Physics at Troy University. In 

2018, Dr. Menon received a $3.2 million grant from NIST (National 

Institutes of Standards and Technology), one of the agencies that 

our Subcommittee proudly has oversight over, to help establish a 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences, which will focus 

on research into polymers and polymer recycling. Dr. Menon has a 

master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Troy University. 

After Dr. Menon is Dr. Gregg Beckham. Dr. Beckham is a Senior 

Research Fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

(NREL). He currently leads and works with an interdisciplinary 

team of biologists, chemists, and engineers at NREL on conversions 

of biomass to chemicals and materials and in the area of plastics 

upcycling. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from MIT. 

Our final witness is Mr. Tim Boven. Mr. Boven is currently the 

Recycling Commercial Director for the Americas within Packaging 

and Specialty Plastics at Dow. He is responsible for developing new 

business models and growth strategies that monetize hard-to-recycle plastic streams in the Americas. Thank you for your leadership 

on that. This includes technologies to enhance mechanical recycling 

and chemical recycling technologies. He holds a B.S. in engineering 

from Western Michigan University and an MBA from Central 

Michigan University. 

As our witnesses should know, you will each have 5 minutes for 

your spoken testimony. Your written testimony will be included in 

the record for the hearing. When you have completed your spoken 

testimony, we will begin questions. Each Member will have 5 minutes to question the panel. 

At this time, we will start with the 5-minute testimony from Mr. 

Sincock. 

TESTIMONY OF PAUL SINCOCK, 

CITY MANAGER, CITY OF PLYMOUTH, MICHIGAN 

Mr. SINCOCK. Thank you, Madam Chairperson. I’m pleased to be 

here today and honored 

[Audio malfunction in hearing room] cycles and to get their materials in proper and acceptable format to the curb to allow our vendors to collect and process that material. We have to be able to do 

this in a cost-effective manner. 

The current market situation does cause us some concern as we 

move forward on the viability of recycling because of the costs that 

are going up. Without a viable end market for recyclable goods, the 

value of recycled goods simply goes down. The cost of collection, 
30 

sorting, shipping all must be factored into the municipal equation. 

When the value of collective recyclables goes down, municipal costs 

go up. When that happens, the local elected officials have the challenge of either increasing the cost of recycling programs and collections or eliminating parts of that program and potentially 

landfilling recyclable materials. 

In my home State of Michigan, recycling ranges from programs 

not offered to a countywide drop-off site to a regional drop-off site 

to municipal drop-off sites to curbside programs with a bucket or 

a bin to curbside programs, which is what we use, is commonly 

called a trash cart you can put your recyclables in. 

If the cost of processing recycling goes up significantly, there may 

be a point from the municipal perspective where we are forced to 

make a choice on recycling or eliminating recycling efforts due to 

cost. Partnerships are key in our program between government, 

our vendor, residents, and end-users. For example, our vendor provides us with educational materials that we can use and adapt as 

part of our program to help educate our residents. 

From a technology standpoint, our solid waste and recycling collection program is pretty basic for our residents. We provide weekly 

pickup of solid waste and recyclables. If—they have a brown cart 

for trash and they have a big 65-gallon cart for recycles as well. 

Our mission as a municipality is to help make sure that our residents understand what is acceptable and what is not acceptable as 

far as the recyclables go. Our municipality alone does not generate 

enough volume of materials needed to provide the sorting and recycling services at a cost-effective methodology. Fortunately, we’re in 

a region where there are large contractors, and there is enough volume to handle that. 

While recycling is the right thing to do, it is also a business, and 

we must be very aware of the business side of recycling. Some materials have limited end markets. Some materials are changing 

faster than the capital investment cycle to keep up with the 

changes, and perhaps future technology will allow us to expand end 

markets to keep up with the changes in materials. 

In our small Michigan municipality, it is our job again to educate 

our residents on an ongoing basis to ensure that the quality of our 

recycled goods is clean and acceptable. Municipalities across the 

country must have cost-effective programs that allow our residents 

to easily recycle materials rather than throwing them in a landfill. 

At a minimum, it must be just as easy to recycle something as it 

is to throw something in the trash. Ideally, it would be easier for 

the homeowner or resident to recycle a product rather than throw 

it out. 

Thank you very much. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Sincock follows:] 
31 

Statement by Mr. Paul J. Sincock 

City Manager of Plymouth, Michigan 

Before the 

Subcommittee on Research and Technology 

of the United States House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

"Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling" 

April 30, 2019 

As a small-town City Manager or Chief Administrative Official, along with our administrative 

team we are responsible to implement the recycling policies of our local elected officials. From an 

environmental perspective the ability to cost effectively reduce, recycle and reuse products is a positive 

feature of the community. From a community perspective, offering recycling is wonderful and a source 

of community pride. From an administrative perspective, our job is to get our residents to get the 

recycles in a proper and acceptable format from the house to the curb to allow our vendor to collect and 

process. 

We also must understand that recycling is a business and it is affected by various markets and 

cost centers. While recycling is the "right thing to do," there is an economic side of the equation that 

needs to be considered. Every recycled product has a value and those values tend to go up and down 

over the course of time. There also needs to be an "end market" or new product than can be made 

from the old recycled product. Without a viable end market for the recycled goods, the value of the 

recycled goods goes down. The cost of collection, sorting and shipping must also be factored into the 

equation. When the value of collected recycles goes down, the municipal costs go up. When that 

happens, the local elected officials have the challenge of increasing the cost of recycling collections or 

eliminate parts ofthe program and potentially must landfill materials. 

From a municipal perspective there are multitudes of differences nationally in recycling 

programs. There is no single method that works for every community across the region, state and 

country. In my home in the State of Michigan; recycling ranges from not offered, to a county wide drop 

off site, to a regional drop off site, to municipal drop off sites, to curbside programs with a recycle 

bucket/bin, to curbside programs with what is commonly seen as a trash cart. In my own City of 

Plymouth, our recycling program has evolved over the years from a staffed drop off center with limited 

hours, to a bagged system, to a bucket/bin system to the system we currently use which is an 

automated collection cart program. Our City also operates a bulk leaf collection program, which allows 

residents to rake fall leaves to the curb and City crews will collect them using claw device on a mini-front 

end load and then dumping into rear load solid waste truck. 

Page 1 of7 
32 

We consider our recycling efforts to be successful and effective, because of our relatively high 

rates of recycling materials that are collected at the curb and our overall diversion of materials away 

from landfills. Between our City recycling efforts and municipal com posting programs we have diverted 

away from landfills a 26-year average of 42% of materials collected through curbside solid waste, 

recycling or bulk leaf pick-ups. 

Our local unit of government is still challenged by a variety of factors that goes into our 

programs. A simple increase in the cost of fuel will make a significant difference in the overall costs of 

the program. There are multiple trucks and other pieces of equipment that operate in our City in order 

to provide to timely effective pick up of containerized or bulk materials. A 20-cent increase in fuel costs 

could trigger fuel subsidy in contractor costs and it increases municipal costs for equipment operations 

as well. Everything in inter-related when it comes to solid waste and recycling issues. If the cost of 

processing recycling goes up significantly there may be a point; from the municipal perspective where 

we are forced to make a choice of collecting recycling or eliminating our recycling efforts due to costs. 

In my City; our official Waste Stream Reports filed with the State of Michigan indicate that in 

1992 we recycled 393.1 tons of materials or about 10% of our waste stream. In 2018 we recycled 972 

tons of material or about 24.7% of our waste stream. During that same period from 1992 to 2018 our 

pounds of "trash" generated, per day/per person has risen from 2.2 pounds to 2.4 pounds per day/per 

person. 

Our recycling programs would not be successful without the partnership we have with our 

vendor; Republic Services. Our staff meets regularly with our Municipal Services Manager who keeps us 

apprised of industry trends and what the future may hold for the solid waste and recycling industry. In 

addition, our vendor provides us with educational materials that we can adapt and reuse as a part of our 

efforts to educate our residents. 

Page 2 of7 
33 

The vendor provides efficient, timely pick up of our residential recyclables and transports them 

to a Material Recovery Facility (MRF). Under the terms of our contract with the vendor, they would 

keep any money generated from the sale of bulk recyclables. However, the company also has the risk of 

market pressures on recycling and if the value of the bulk product goes down, the company takes on 

that risk. 

In our City, the relationship between the vendor and the municipality has been excellent and we 

work together as a team to provide a high quality, easy to use system for the consumers and efficient 

pick up at the curb. We also work in partnership to continue to provide educational materials to our 

residents to help insure that our recyclables are of high quality with minimal contamination. Our 

current contract with our vendor is expiring this year. When we bid the contract later this spring, we 

anticipate having increases in bid costs for recycling services, due to the current trend in markets. 

From a technology standpoint, our solid waste and recycling collection program is a pretty basic 

system for our residents, that provides for weekly pick up of solid waste and recyclables. They have one 

brown 65-gallon cart with wheels for solid waste (trash) and one blue 65-gallon cart with wheels for 

their recyclables. Our mission as a municipality is to help make sure that our residents understand what 

is acceptable and what is not acceptable. We also must work with our residents to properly prepare 

materials prior to placing them in the recycle cart. 

During the summer and fall seasons we also offer compost pick up with a third truck. As 

previously indicated, we also offer a bulk leaf pick up in the fall by municipal crews. Although, we have 

expended a lot of time, through education encouraging our residents to use mulching mowers. The 

lawn care industry has also helped by increasing the technology of modern lawn mower design and 

current designs do an excellent job of fine cutting grass and leaves to be com posted on the lawn itself, 

rather than being collected. From 2010 to 2018 we have seen our volume of compostable yard waste 

(grass & leaves) go down from just over 641 tons to 519.5 tons of material. 

Through meetings with our vendor we are aware that the end markets for recyclables are 

demanding product with a significantly lower contamination rates than previously allowed. Probably 

the best "visual" that I could give you is that we have what we would call the cardboard pizza box and it 

is a recyclable product in our system and perfectly acceptable. However, the greasy cardboard pizza box 

is not acceptable. If a couple of greasy pizza boxes end up in the cardboard recycles, then that could 

Page 3 of7 
34 

contaminate the entire load (most likely a bail) of cardboard and make the value somewhere at or below 

zero. At that point the vendor must make a choice of holding the material and expend resources on 

storage or to send the material to the landfill. Therefore, the partnership on education between the 

vendor and the municipality is so critical and must be on-going for the residents. 

We are currently using a large national corporation as our solid waste and recycling vendor and 

as previously indicated we have an excellent partnership with the vendor. Republic Services provides 

collection and processing services in 40 states covering 240 markets with approximately 35,000 

employees. This is important from the standpoint that the company will generate the volumes of 

materials that will allow them to be able to place materials in a variety of different markets to possibly 

obtain a positive value for recycled goods. 

Our municipality alone does not generate the volume of materials needed to provide sorting 

and recycling services. Our region does provide necessary volumes and the use of private contractors 

who provides collections from several communities, basically allows us to offer solid waste and recycling 

services to our residents at a reasonable cost. Again, we anticipate price increases with a new contract 

later this year as we come to the end of our current five-year contract with the vendor. 

While recycling is the "right thing to do" it is also a business and we must be very aware of the 

business side of recycling. Some materials have limited end markets, some materials are changing faster 

than the capital investment cycle to keep up with the changes. Perhaps, future technology will allow us 

to expand end markets and to keep up with changes of materials. I would indicate that in January of 

this year it was reported to our community that in the plastics industry HOPE had a "good market", but 

PET had limited end markets. Plastic water bottles have changed significantly over a period of time. 

Manufactures are "light-weighting" the bottles. While that makes the bottle a little lighter for the 

purchaser/user of the bottle and it makes shipping slightly lighter, which affects transportation costs. 

From a recycling standpoint it took 48,000 plastic water bottles to equal one ton of recovered materials 

in the year 2000, in 2015 it took 92,000 plastic bottles to make that same ton of recovered product and 

the value of that ton of material is less. We are also now finding that end users of recyclables are 

requiring significantly less contamination in any load, which is also affecting pricing. The fact that one of 

the largest importers of recyclables has closed the door on accepting new product, has significantly 

reduced the value of the products. The Seattle Times using data from RecyclingMarkets.net ran this 

graphic showing the affects on the value of recyclables in the Pacific Northwest and across North 

America. 

Page 4 of7 
35 

China doses the door, prices crash 

The average price paid to recyclers for a ton of mixed paper in the Pacific Northwest and across 

North America has plummeted In the last year. 

$75 

r--IUI.Yl8 

1 China ~nn~ new -·•·-r·~"·l>ansQAI~mytllt1lJ, · ~IUdlllt mlxed paper. 

60 NAT!OIIilU A\IERAIIE ····~ ...................... ~······\,~:,,-······~ 

40 

20 

Nov. ian. March May 

2016 

MY 

2017 

Sept. Nov. 

2018 

EMilY ~L f:NG / TilE Sf:ATTLE TIM~S 

In our small Michigan municipality, it is our job to educate the residents on an on-going basis to 

help insure that the quality of our recycled materials is clean and acceptable. Municipalities across the 

country must have programs that allows our residents to easily recycle materials, rather than throwing 

them out and landfilling the materials. Municipalities must also provide on-going education for 

residents to stay informed and to help insure a "quality" recyclable item enters the recycle stream. At a 

minimum, it must be just as easy to recycle something as it is to throw it out in the trash. Ideally, it 

would be easier for the homeowner/resident to recycle a product rather than throw it out. Due to the 

abundance of recycling programs available at home and at the office, we are seeing that people are 

aware of their personal trash volume and at least in our community look to recycle when possible. You 

are seeing corporations looking for ways to reduce the use of plastics, including simple things like plastic 

straws, due mainly in part to consumer awareness. Over the years you have seen food establishments 

switch from Styrofoam boxes to paper boxes as a part of their environmental efforts and in part, being 

driven by consumer demands and in some cases governmental requirements. 

In my home State of Michigan, we have what is commonly known as a "bottle bill," and basically 

any carbonated beverage has a charge of 10 cents per bottle or can on the product. This is mandated by 

State law. The 10 cents is returned to the consumer when they return the empty bottle or can to a 

store that sells that product. When the law first took effect, it took a while for consumers to catch on 

as well as those processing and handling product and the returnables. Technology has helped and now 

Page 5 of7 
36 

stores are using bar code scanners when returning cans and bottles and it is a basically self-serv program 

for consumers. Personally, I would rate the Michigan Bottle Bill as a success as it has helped insure that 

these recyclable items are returned to be recycled. 

The Michigan Bottle Bill has resulted in our highways being cleaner as there is less debris from 

returnable bottles and cans. While the private sector was concerned about the implementation of the 

Bottle Bill and they may still have many ofthose concerns today. However, from the consumer stand 

point; it is an easy to use system and education of consumers is also fairly easy to explain to new 

residents of the state or visitors to our Great Lakes State. 

As a result of the Michigan Bottle Bill; the private sector has changed their methods of 

collections, implemented some technology and the system is fairly effective. There are still issues with 

bottles and cans from other states that may have been transported into Michigan. There are still issues 

with store branded products that are purchased at stores different from the one you are attempting to 

return the item to. The issue of plastics recycling is significant as we are effectively collecting it, but how 

do we cost effectively recycle it. There are still some flaws in the system and not every bottle or can is 

recycled. However, as the law took effect and it took some time to develop methods to efficiently 

handle products. I am sure that even today; in some areas of our State it is easier to handle and process 

returnables than it is in other more parts of our State. 

The Michigan Bottle Bill is an example of the government and private sector working together to 

create some positive achievements. The positive of this program is that we have created a significant 

amount of recyclable material that is being prepared to be recycled. We have closed the loop on the 

reducing, recycling and reusing products, which is the goal of any recycling program. Although, we still 

have the issue of plastics. Obviously, metal cans are much easier to recycle and can "close the loop" 

fairly quickly. 

One of the biggest issues related to the "Bottle Bill" that I hear about is the fact that 

uncarbonated plastic water bottles (just plain water) are NOT included in the required deposit. Again, 

the program is not 100% effective, it HAS caused more recycling, more work for consumers and those 

handling products at the retail and wholesale levels. Plastic recycling is an issue that needs to have a 

cost-effective end market for all of those plastic bottles that we collect to have a totally effective 

program. 

In order to have a successful program of recycling the municipality must help insure that 

product is recycled and not landfilled. Creditability of recycling rests at all levels of government as each 

level will need to have their own piece of the "recycling pie." As an example; there is no national bottle 

bill and deposits on bottles and cans vary from state to state and range from zero to some price 

established by the state. The local level of government is where recycling starts. The local unit must 

provide on-going education for its residents in order to have an effective program. 

Page 6 of7 
37 

However, in order to have a successful and creditable program there must be viable end 

markets for the materials collected and hopefully future technology in processing will help create more 

end markets for the products we collect. In order to Reduce, Recycle and Reuse products there must be 

an end market for the product to be fully recycled and reused. We must all agree that recycling is the 

right thing to do, but that it is also a market driven program that depends on technology to develop end 

uses for collected materials. We must also provide our residents with a program that is easy to follow 

and allow us to move materials from the house to the curb and ultimately recycled at a reasonable cost. 

REUSE 

REDUCE 

RECYCLE 

We must remember that while recycling starts at home, it still must be collected in some 

fashion, sorted, bailed and ultimately tuned into a new product that allows the reuse of the original 

container. The recycling process is a journey that starts at home but travels through many hands before 

becoming a new product. We must insure that we close the "loop" on reducing, recycling and reusing 

products and we must have an end use for the products that we recycle. 

Page 7 of7 
38 

e 

e 

201 s. Main 

Plymouth, Ml 48170 

734.453.1234 

psincock@plymouthmi.g 

QY 

www.p!ymouthmLgO\! 

Sin cock 

March 2001- Present 

City Manager• City of Plymouth, Michigan 

July 1, 2018-June 30, 2019 

Rotary International • District Governor for District 6400 with portions 

of southeast and south-central Michigan as well as Windsor- Essex in 

Ontario, Canada 

2010- Present 

Chairman • Quality Review Committee • Emergent Health PartnersHuron Valley Ambulance 

The Oty Manager is the Chief Administrative Officer of the City and 

serves at the pleasure of the elected City Commission. The Manager 

supports budget presentations, business plan reporting to insure 

compliance with the adopted Strategic Plan of the City, including the 

one-year tasks. The City Manager in most cases is the public 

information officer of the City. The Manager also must be familiar with 

all Department operations. 

Served as the Director of Municipal Services for the City of Plymouth 

and was instrumental ln the creation and logistics of implementation 

of a Pay As You Throw Trash Disposal System in the City. Also, 

directed the City's efforts on recycling from creating a staffed Clty drop 

off location to the current automated cart program. Served as a 

conference speaker on the topic of Solid Waste and Recycling 

programs both in Michigan and Ontario. 

Also is a frequent speaker on the topic of Customer Service in both 

private and publlc sector and has done presentations both in 

and in Canada. In addition, is serving as the Chairman of the 

Review Committee for Emergent Health Partners 

Ambulance. 
39 

¢urrently the City Manager for the City of Plymouth with 41 full time 

, ~ffiployees and approximately the same amount of part time 

,1!mployees. The City of Plymouth is located in southeast Michigan 

between the City of Detroit and the City of Ann Arbor (home to the 

University of Michigan). The City of Plymouth is at 25-million-dollar 

unit of government, with a General Fund Budget of approximately 8.5~ 

mi!lion~do!lar Genera! Fund. 

!n addition to duties as City Manager currently serving Rotary 

International as the District Governor for District 6400. This District 

area covers 52 Rotary Clubs in two countries, with clubs ranging in size 

from 15 to 130. 

Completed Disney lnstltute Courses on 

• Quality Service 

Employee Engagement 

Leadership Excef!ence. 

Published articles in the Michigan Municipal Review magazine on 

Municipal Operational topics in areas of Public Safety and Municipal 

Services. 

Served on multiple community Boards, committees and organizations 

from the Plymouth Symphony to the Plymouth Rotary Foundation. 

Past President of the Rotary Club of Plymouth 

Past President of the Plymouth Rotary Foundation Board of Directors 

Born and raised in the City of Plymouth and has been employed by the 

City of Plymouth in a full~time capaclty for over 40 years. Has served 

the City as Assistant Director of Recreation and Arena Operations, 

Grants and Special Events Coordinator, Assistant City Manager, 

Director of Public Safety, and City Manager since 2001. 
40 

Chairwoman STEVENS. And now we will hear from Dr. Menon. 

TESTIMONY OF DR. GOVIND MENON, 

DIRECTOR, SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, AND 

CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, 

TROY UNIVERSITY 

Dr. MENON. Chairwoman Stevens, Ranking Member Baird, and 

the distinguished Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for including me to this discussion. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. Let’s just get your mic on. Hold on. We 

want the world to hear you. 

Dr. MENON. So do I. Chairwoman Stevens, Ranking Member 

Baird, and the distinguished Members of the Subcommittee, thank 

you for including me in this discussion concerning the recycling of 

plastics. 

I’ve been asked today to talk about the recently established Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences at Troy University, 

but before I do so, let me begin with a few facts that will place a 

center such as ours in context. 

According to the EPA, currently, the plastics recycling industry 

is operating below capacity with employment figures comparable 

with the U.S. automotive industry. Undoubtedly, an increase in 

supply will increase employment and capital investment. 

One of the issues facing the recycling industry is the practical 

limitations on the large-scale recyclability of the existing types of 

plastics available in the market. Simple factors like color, odor, 

strength, and malleability determine the value of recycled plastics. 

Additionally, environmental concerns behind the breaking down of 

plastic products loom the industry. 

Currently, there is over 200 billion pounds of plastic that can be 

shaped, extruded, or otherwise transformed into new products. 

However, at present, the recovery rate for all plastics in the United 

States is only about 9 percent. Of the two main plastics, PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and HDPE—high-density polyethylene— 

the United States has a recovery rate of roughly 30 percent. The 

need for more plastics recycling is made evident and undeniably 

provides a case for our dedicated center of research. 

The establishment of the Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences was made possible by a successful $3.2 million 

grant awarded by NIST. The center will serve as a fully integrated 

multidisciplinary research facility that will bridge various majors 

and academic ranks. During the initial phase of establishing the 

center, one of the primary focuses will be on developing a state-ofthe-art laboratory in polymer recycling. This major emphasis will 

aid to advance capabilities and offer support structure for local and 

national industries. In the long-term, the center will help address 

plastics recycling from a holistic perspective with complex issues of 

collecting, sorting, and cleaning with characterization. 

Moreover, the center will assist to engender a well-equipped 

next-generation workforce to these industries through appropriate 

course and program offerings. Students trained at the center will 

participate and be engaged in real-life, real-time industry projects. 

In order to glean the larger issues at stake, at its inception, the 

center hosted a road-mapping session at the recent annual Plastics 
41 

Recycling Conference held here in Washington, D.C. I will briefly 

discuss the three salient points raised by the nearly 200 attendees 

of the conference workshop. 

The primary issue facing the recycling industry is the supply of 

feedstock. If plastics recycling industry depended on the various 

States to supply their plant with recyclable feedstock, most plants 

could only run their facilities for a few days each year. 

The second largest issue facing the private sector is access to current technology. As the demand has continued to grow, there is an 

immediate need for resins with letters of nonobjection from the 

FDA (Food and Drug Administration). Collection infrastructure, 

sorting technology, and resin chemistry is limited. 

The third and final issue that was raised during the workshop 

was related to the environmental impact of the recycling process. 

The point is here—the point here is that the technologies developed 

must be flexible and incorporate universal utility because the market for material changes rapidly, and materials available today 

may not be available the next week. 

Overall, the above questions make visible a significant lacunae 

in contemporary research and plastics recycling that can be effectively translated to sustainable goals in the industry. The center 

will focus on short-, medium-, and long-term issues to be resolved 

to negate these existing gaps. The specific projects will be carefully 

selected, prioritized, and undertaken in partnership with industry, 

community, and other stakeholders. 

The nearly zero carbon footprint technology of plastics recycling 

must be scaled up to meet the demands of global waste reduction. 

Ultimately, the Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences 

at Troy University will identify, develop, and implement solutions 

to the problems in contemporary plastics recycling by linking academia, industry, and community. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Menon follows:] 
42 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menon Testimony/ 2019 

BEFORE THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF 

REPRESENTATIVES 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND 

TECHNOLOGY 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND 

TECHNOLOGY 

Govind K. Menon, Ph. D. 

Director, School of Science and Technology 

Troy University 

Troy, Alabama 36082 

30 April, 2019 

Washington, DC 
43 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menan Testimony/ 2019 

Chairwoman Stevens, and the members of the subcommittee: 

Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this seminal discussion today. 

The Troy University Board of Trustees approved the creation of a new School of 

Science and Technology on December 13. 2012. This school, which is comprised of five 

departments, Biological and Environmental Sciences; Chemistry and Physics; Mathematics; 

Geospatial Informatics and Computer Science is housed within the College of Arts and 

Sciences. The mission of the School of Science and Technology is to bring agency to the 

teaching of sciences, research in pure and applied sciences, and in its relevance to industry. 

I am currently a Professor of Physics in the Department of Chemistry and Physics at 

Troy University. In my I 9'h year of service, in 2015, I was appointed as the founding director 

of the School of Science and Technology at Troy University. The desire to establish an 

academic center related to the recycling of plastics was already brought to my attention during 

my interview for the position of Director. 

I am happy to report that Troy University's School of Science and Technology has 

recently established a Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences (CMMS) 1 at Troy 

University in Troy, Alabama. The establishment of the Center was made possible by a 

successful 3.2 million dollar grant awarded by the National Institute of Standards and 

Technology (NIST). This Center will serve as a fully integrated multi-disciplinary research 

facility that will bridge various majors and academic ranks. Undergraduate students will be 

encouraged to enter into research early on in their academic career to develop a sustained and 

deeper understanding of the ±leld. Faculty researchers and students will form the mainstay for 

the Center. 

1 Hereafter referred to as Center. 

2 
44 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menan Testimony/ 2019 

During the initial phase of establishing the Center, one of the primary focuses will be 

on developing a state-of-the-art laboratory for polymer/plastics recycling. This major 

emphasis will aid to advance capabilities, and offer support structure for local and national 

industries involved in the rapidly growing market sector of polymer recycling. In the long 

term, the Center will help address plastics recycling from a holistic perspective with complex 

issues of collecting, sorting, and cleaning with characterization-with processing and product 

development as core competencies. Moreover, the Center will assist to engender a wellequipped next generation workforce to these industries through appropriate course and 

program offerings. Students trained at the Center will participate and be engaged in real 

life/real time industry projects. As part of this initiative, Troy University will collaborate with 

the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to offer innovative programs in Materials 

Science and Engineering to Physics and Chemistry students at Troy. 

1. Scope 

Responding to requests from a local industry, KW Plastics, the School of Science and 

Technology faculty at Troy University has previously partnered in research concerning core 

aspects of the recycling ofplastics2

. One of the current issues facing the polymer and recycling 

industry is the practical limitations on the large scale recyclability of the existing types of 

plastic containers currently available in the market Simple factors like color, odor, strength 

and malleability determine the value of recycled plastics. Additionally, environmental 

concerns behind the breaking down of plastic products loom the industry. Together with the 

immediacy to adopt a green lifestyle and the rapidly increasing standards for environmentally 

friendly materials, the present-day plastic recycling industry has a large demand to filL 

Currently, over three hundred million tons of plastics are manufactured across the globe3• This 

provides for a potential market of over two hundred billion pounds of new material that can be 

shaped, extruded, or otherwise transformed into new plastic products. However, according to 

2 Preliminary research was conducted by our resident Analytical Chemist Dr. Shaoyang Liu on the odors of recycled 

samples provided by KW Plastics in 2017-2018. 1 "Earth Day 2018: End Plastic Pollution'" www.earthday.org, 2018. 

3 
45 

Center for Materials and Manufucturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menan Testimony/2019 

the most recent Municipal Solid Waste Report from the Environmental Protection Agency, at 

present, the recovery rate for all plastics in the United States is only nine percent 4

. Of the two 

main plastics, Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and High-density polyethelene (HDPE), the 

United States has a recovery rate of only 31 percent and 28 percent respectively5

. 

Consequently, KW Plastics, the world's largest plastics recycler, headquartered in Troy, 

Alabama, has experienced a phenomenal growth in recent years. This is due to proprietary 

research that has expanded the recovery rate of the stated two plastics that dominate the 

marketplace. However, this opportunity also comes with challenges to the industry. To 

expand the application of the recycled materials, customers not only require good mechanical 

properties, but also demand superior sensory qualities for the recycled plastics. To expand, 

one of the major concerns of recycled resin is its odor. Due to the microstructure of the 

feedstock, some recycled materials would hold unpleasant smells. These odors prevent them 

from being used in products that come in close contact with people, such as food trays, inner 

parts of vehicles, etc. Thus, even if all the other requirements have been met by the material, 

the odor will restrict its applicability and hence it's utility. 

Clearly, innovation and implementation of new technologies lead to successful 

manufacturing, and are the key to support long-term competitiveness. To obtain necessary 

knowledge and appropriate instrumentation to solve this problem, chemists at KW Plastics 

teamed up with the faculty of School of Science and Technology at Troy University in Troy, 

Alabama6

• At present, Troy's faculty have been successful at tackling some of the simpler 

issues in this field. For instance, one of the research outcomes from the joint study predicted 

that the unpleasant odors from recycled resin could be caused by a large variety of volatile 

compounds released from the material7

. In addition, they observed that due to the huge 

variation of the feedstock, the odorous volatile compounds changed significantly from batch 

to batch. To detect these volatile compounds, an advanced chemical analysis technique, gas 

4 "Plastics: Material-Specific Data", Facts and Figures about Materials, Figures and Recycling, EPA, 2018. 5 Doug Clauson, "Modernizing the Resin Identification Code", ASTM Internationa/.2016. 

6 KW Plastics representative joined the School of Science and Technology advisory council in Fall 2016, 7 Preliminary research was conducted by our resident Analytical Chemist Dr. Shaoyang Liu on the odors of recycled 

samples provided by KW Plastics in 2017-2018. 

4 
46 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menon Testimony/ 2019 

chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), was employed. By coupling this with an 

advanced extraction technology, viz. solid phase microcxtraction (SPME), a sensitive and 

rapid analysis method was successfully established to monitor the large number of volatile 

compounds in the recycled resin. This method of analysis provided a critical tool to 

control/eliminate the odor and improve the product quality. As a result, presently, the chemists 

at KW Plastics are able to monitor the odorous compounds in every batch of production while 

implementing strategies to control, and subsequently, regulate the odor inherent in these 

products. It has also become evident that existing resin chemistry and labeling technology in 

the field needs improvement8

• This is a small but relevant example that demonstrates the 

effectiveness of researchers of School of Science and Technology teaming with local industry 

to solve pertinent problems in the field, thereby validating the potential of the newly 

established Center in being a crucial force in addressing demanding issues in the field of 

polymer recycling. 

In order to glean the larger issues at stake, at its inception, the Center hosted a road 

mapping conference session at the recent annual Plastics Recycling Conference held in 

Washington D.C. I will briefly recapitulate three salient points raised by the nearly 200 

attendees of the conference workshop. In the coming years, the Center will focus on tackling 

these poignant issues. The primary issue facing the recycling industry is the supply of 

feedstock. If the plastics recycling industry depended on the various states to supply their plant 

with recyclable feedstock, most plants could only run their facilities for a few days each year. 

Recycling plants purchase material from municipalities and material recovery facilities 

(MRFs) throughout North America and continue to explore global possibilities. Studies have 

proven that U.S. has both the supply and the demand, yet lack of infrastructure limits 

collection. We are filling American landfills with materials that have proven to have value 

with domestic markets and demand with domestic manufacturers. Development process that 

ensure a sustainable recycling practice can divert millions of tons of waste while generating 

large monetary rewards in revenue (per state) and save private businesses and local 

' Alexander Tullo, "Innovation is Still Alive in Plastics", Chemical and Engineering News, 2018. 

5 
47 

Center for Materials and 'v1anufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menon Testimony/ 2019 

governments money in hauling and disposal costs. To a large extent, the collection of 

recyclable plastics is an issue of awareness. The Center has the advantage of being situated 

within an academic institution. Awareness begins with education. While Communities and 

municipalities will have to do their due diligence, the Center will help develop a viable plan 

that can be deployed at various levels to facilitate the collection of recyclable plastics. Further, 

the Center will work alongside the numerous plastics recycling organizations in the United 

States to educate and assist in the recycling process. 

The second largest issue facing the private sector is access to current technology. As 

the demand has continued to grow, there is an immediate need for resins with Letters of Non 

Objection from FDA9

, and resins with technical specifications regarding color and smell. 

However, most recycling centers operate on very restricted budget. As a result most of the 

recycling centers cannot upgrade their infrastructure on a sufficiently regular basis. There is 

also a large need for additional technology surrounding sorting techniques in order to recover 

more material and supply a quality resin. Currently. there is an unprecedented demand from 

domestic markets for more types of plastics and a larger demand from end markets. 

Recyclability is less of an issue but collection infrastructure, sorting technology and resin 

chemistry is limited. Hence, these technologies offer a large opportunity with significant 

potential impact. Infrared technology does not read back-packaging and certain labels, which 

are in fact recyclable but unrecoverable if the product cmmot get past the infrared readers. 

Investment in technology and chemistry could give a boost to more postconsumer resin being 

used in new applications. Naturally. research and development will play a significant role in 

the daily activities of the center. I fully expect the Center to extend the existing technologies 

beyond its current limitations. 

The third and final issue that was raised during the workshop was related to the 

environmental impact of the recycling process. Recycling plastics conserve energy and natural 

9 George Sadler, "Recycling of Polymers for Food Use: A Current Perspective", The Journal of Physical Chemistry, 

!995. 

6 
48 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menan Testimony/2019 

resources. Recycling is a sustainable solution from manufacturing to waste management. 

Plastics recycling has nearly a net zero carbon footprint comparable to virgin plastic 

production. Recycling saves significant energy in comparison with extracting virgin 

material. Recycling plastics reduces the amount of energy and natural resources (such as 

water, petroleum and natural) needed to create virgin plastic. According to the American 

Plastics Council, the production of plastics accounts for 4 percent of U.S. energy consumption, 

and 70 percent of plastics in the United States are made from domestic natural gasJC1

• In 

addition to energy conservation, recycling plastics save landfill space. We know that plastics 

do not degrade in the landfill. According to U.S. EPA, recycling one ton of plastic material 

saves 7.4 cubic yards of landfill space 11 • 

There are many materials that are readily recyclable, but are not currently collectable 

in sufficient quantity to make recycling feasible. In those areas, development of additional 

quantity-multiplying technologies would be necessary to make the leap forward. Research is 

needed in sorting technologies, cleaning technologies, and waste treatment science to combat 

the highly variable and fluid conditions in the reclaimed marketspace. Improvements in 

cleaning, for example, would allow higher utilization of recycled products in markets where 

smell or color is a sensitive issue. These problems in recycling are similar to activation energy 

in the field of chemistry-there arc certain obstacles that must be cleared for the reaction to go 

forward. The obstacles in recycling processing are the quantity of new resources and 

economical techniques in cleaning and treatment, and clearing either of those can drive the 

process forward toward higher recycling overall. 

The point here is that the technologies developed must be flexible and incorporate 

universal utility- because the market for material changes rapidly, and materials available 

today may not be available next week. Technology must then be adaptable to new resources. 

10 "Recycling Plastics Also Reduces the Amount of Energy", BUS 370, Ashford University, 2015. 11 "Volume-to-Weight Conversion Factors" US Environmental Protection Agen'y CJ[fice of Resource Conservation 

and Recovery. April 20 16. 

7 
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Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menan Testimony/ 2019 

In as much as possible, the Center will retain adaptability to feedstock as a core requirement 

for all the technologies developed. 

2. Goals 

The Center at Troy University will focus on the recycling of plastics with research 

considering not only the science involved in recycling plastics but also with the logistics in 

collecting a larger supply of used plastics. Additionally, it will develop and establish a welldefined standard for the quality of recycled plastics. As mentioned earlier, the use and need 

for recycling of plastics provide for a rapidly growing market that must be addressed through 

partnerships with industries, communities, academics, and municipalities. The Center at Troy 

University will help address this issue through education, training and research. The following 

are proposed: 

2.1 Education and Training 

Develop course curricula that includes polymers and polymer recycling 

Introduce the importance of sustainability in materials in existing courses 

Introduce environmental impact of materials in course materials 

Provide short courses to industry and communities 

As part of this program Troy University will partner with UAB to offer 

Physics/Chemistry students the opportunity to earn a bachelor in Physics/Chemistry 

and a bachelor in Materials Science and Engineering through a 3 + 2 program and/or 

the potential for an accelerated MS degree in Materials Science and Engineering at 

UAB 

2.2 Research and Development 

• 

• 

• 

Establish laboratory capabilities for polymer characterization, testing and processing 

Develop research topics in partnership with industry and municipalities 

Provide equipment and expertise in polymer recycling to help industry solve complex 

problems 

Act as a one-stop resource for community, industry and academia interested in and 

involved in polymer recycling 

8 
50 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menan Testimony/ 2019 

The Center will engage faculty and students across all academic areas to work in an integrated 

problem-solving environment. Undergraduate students will especially be encouraged to 

conduct applied research to link theory to applications. 

2.3 Equipment, Methods, Infrastructure Development 

The intent on the first phase of development will be to primarily develop existing labs 

to include capabilities in polymer characterization, testing and processing. The bulk of the 

grant funded by the NIST will be used for the purchase and installation of equipment. The 

following equipment will be acquired to augment existing capabilities: 

2.3.a Thermal Analysis Equipment: Thermal analysis equipment is needed to understand the 

thermal characteristics on the material for processing and utilizations. The following have 

already been ordered: 

Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC): Thermal transitions of a polymer play a 

major role in how the polymer can be processed and utilized. Glass transition 

temperature and melt temperature are the starting points for understanding polymers. 

Thermogravimetric AnaZvzer (TGA): A TGA provides analysis of a polymer over a 

range of temperature up to degradation. The mass loss over time provides 

understanding on the polymers reaction to temperatures, during processing it is vital 

to understand thermal limits and degradation of polymers. 

Rheometer: Understanding the rheological behavior of a polymer is paramount in 

understanding processing parameters and methodologies to shape and form the 

polymer into products. 

Melt Flow Index (MFJ): Whereas most academics and scientists prefer rheological 

data, plant processing personnel need the MFI to set processing parameters on their 

equipment. 

The key methods of analysis here include measuring heat capacity, melting point, and 

transition temperature of polymers. Additionally, investigating the boiling point, thermal 

stability, oxidation process of recycled plastics will help us gain an understanding of it 

durability. 

9 
51 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menon Testimony/ 2019 

2.3.b Mechanical Testing: Mechanical testing equipment is needed to understand the mechanical 

characteristics of the material for processing and utilizations. The following will be ordered in 

the current academic year: 

Universal Testing Frame: A servo-hydraulic test frame (MTS/Instron or comparable) 

with environmental capability is needed to provide mechanical properties (tensile, 

flexure, fatigue, etc.) of processed polymers. An environment chamber will help 

understand the material behavior under different environmental conditions of heat, 

etc. This is especially needed to understand limitations of recycled polymers 

Instrumented impact test machine: One of the major issues with the recycling of 

polymers is the degradation of impact properties. There is a need to understand the 

reduction and how this reduction in properties could be eliminated or minimized. 

Measuring material physical properties, including strength, peel force, tear force, springiness, 

elongation, distension, adhesiveness, and hardness will help understand the range of 

applicability. 

2.3.c Processing Equipment: Processing equipment is needed for machining, compression 

molding, casting, extrusion and forging. The following are proposed12: 

• Shredder: Plastic products, consumer goods, industrial trim offs, etc. will be in bulk 

form and size reduction equipment will be needed to re-process the material into flake 

and/or powder form. The mechanical reduction process is typically used in industry 

with little understanding on the effects of the polymer microstructure, this will provide 

an opportunity to further research the effects of mechanical size reduction. 

Twin Screw Extruder (with cooling and pelletizing capabilities): The extruder will 

provide opportunities to re-compound recycled material and add fillers and/or 

additives to restore desired properties. Segmented screws with options to change shear 

and mixing zones will be needed for different polymer types. Multiple loss-in-weight 

feeder systems will accurately dispense additives for compounding. Cooling systems 

12 Equipment in this categmy will be prioritized and purchased when needed. 

10 
52 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menon Testimony/ 2019 

will be needed for controlled air and/or water cooling depending on the polymer 

system. Puller and pelletizing unit will be variable speed for controlled extrusion speed 

and pellet profile. 

• Injection molding unit (with basic tooling for samples): Injection molding is the most 

common and widely used method for plastics processing. Most recycled plastics will 

end up at injection molding plants to be reprocessed into products. It is important to 

use the same process to evaluate the material for research purposes. 

Major processing methods include size reduction. extruding with cooling and pelletizing 

techniques and injection molding for application development. 

3. Proposed Schedule 13 

Yetlr I (current): 

Establish search committee to hire a chief scientist 

Polymer chemist begins collaboration with UAB material science department and 

formulates a research plan 

Polymer chemist gains familiarity with a large scale polymer lab and associated 

instrumentation 

Retrofit assigned lab space for thermal analysis instrumentation 

Procure instrumentation for thermal analysis 

Prepare and host a road mapping conference 

Yet1r II: 

Install and establish the analysis lab 

Retrofit assigned lab space for Mechanical Testing 

Procure instrumentation for Mechanical Testing 

Polymer chemist engages in active joint research with UAB 

Center engages student scholars in research 

11 Based on the duration of the grant, this is a three-year plan. 

11 
53 

Center for Materials and :vtanufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menan Testimony/2019 

Seek additional funds 

Year III: 

• Establish and advisory board that includes regional stakeholders 

• Install and establish the processing lab 

Research students become an integral part of the Center 

Develop a joint program in material science with UAB 

Develop a clear long term vision 

Begin full scale research at CMMS 

Develop a national database of stakeholders 

• Include the logistics of collection technologies into research 

Seek external funds 

• Develop plans for long term sustainability for the Center 

4. Projected Results 

4.1 Resource to Industry, Municipalities and Communities 

It is clear from our preliminary analysis that the plastic recycling industry has both 

environmental and economic benefits that are most often unrealized. On the technical end, the 

range of issues span from the inconsistency of feed stock to the limiting technology in the 

sorting process. However, a larger issue remains apropos a cost effective way of procuring 

feed stock. The need for outreach beyond the state of Alabama will also be a part of the central 

mission of the Center. The economic sway of a more comprehensive and systematic approach 

to the gathering and recycling of plastics is only exceeded in scope by its environmental 

impact. 

The Center will be a resource for educating communities, through outreach programs 

on the economic and environmental benefits of plastics recycling. A more educated 

community will be a more enlightened partner in the collection and preliminary sorting 

process. Generally, most sorting facilities are owned and operated by municipalities or their 

contractors. Diverting plastic material from landfills will be a key result in securing a 

12 
54 

Center for 'V!aterials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy l!niversity/Menon Testimony/ 2019 

continuous source offeedstock. Municipalities will realize the long-term economic benefits of 

the program through increased employment and cost savings in garbage disposal, not to 

mention the improved environmental impact. The key results of the program will be a facility 

that local and national industries would access to advance the field of recycled plastics. The 

Center will be resourced with equipment and expertise to help industry advance to a state-ofthe-art facility in plastics recycling. Increasing and promoting the capacity of the recycling 

industry provides spin-off benefits in increased employment (which rivals the automotive 

industry in numbers), lower dependence on foreign oil (a precursor tor polymers) and offers a 

valuable resource for other manufactured goods and products with the obvious benefit to the 

environment. Thus, the model developed by the Center with respect to education, research, 

industry engagement and the outputs thereof will extend these benefits locally and 

internationally. 

5. Human Resource Development 

Troy University is committed to human capital development. The teaching and 

training of the applied sciences will be an integral part of the mission for the Center. 

Students from all disciplines will be eligible to work on research projects along with 

individual faculty advisors. Troy University has already committed the necessary faculty 

lines to supplement the technical expertise. Also, potential physical space for new 

laboratories have been identified and assigned as the future location of the Center. By 

design, the proposed labs at the Center will support regional entrepreneurs and businesses 

with product development that foster long-term job creation and business expansion. The 

Center will leverage this engagement and will foster entrepreneurial education and provide 

opportunities for students interested in starting businesses aligned to the Center's mission. 

An advisory board comprising of members from the plastics industry, recycling 

industry, trade organizations, municipalities, and other agencies together with key personnel 

from the Center will be formed to help manage, direct and provide oversight to the Center 

activities. The advisory board will meet semi-annually at Troy and provide direction to the 

13 
55 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menan Testimony/ 2019 

Center and new avenues for integration into industry and curricula. The advisory board will 

also guide the assessment plan, questionnaire and survey materials required to monitor the 

progress of the Center. The board will play a key role in directing the expansion of the Center 

and its facilities. 

The broad concepts of developing the Center, its function and interaction with industry 

is outlined and proposed above. However. input from industry experts, academics, 

municipalities, trade organizations, legislators, etc. is needed to ensure the success and 

viability of the Center. 

6. Conclusion 

Currently, the plastics recycling industry is operating below capacity with employment 

figures comparable with the U.S. automotive industry (according to U.S. EPA) 14. 

Undoubtedly, an increase in supply will increase employment and capital investment. An 

increase in recycling will increase tax base, lower energy costs and decrease dependence on 

foreign sources tor oil, manufacturing and consumer goods. 

According to the Southeast Recycling Development Council, if Alabama increases its 

recycling by just 10% more each year, the potential economic impact would be over 1,400 new 

jobs, over $66 million in personal annual income, and $3 million in annual state tax 

revenue 15 • This equation could be duplicated throughout the nation. Additionally, the 

Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation held a study in 2009 and discovered 

that Tennessee counties, cities and businesses disposed of approximately 7.6 million tons of 

solid waste at an average cost of $277 million. If Tennessee had recycled 75% of what was 

buried in landfills, the state could have captured $882 million in revenue, not including the 

additional savings in tip fees 16• Besides, the Georgia Department of Community Affairs 

estimates that Georgians pay $100 million to landfill roughly $300 million worth of recyclables 

14 "Region 4: Municipal Government Toolkit", archive.epa.gov, 2016. 

"Southeast Recycling Development Council (SERDC) study, 2016. 

"Quoted by Managing Director ofKW plastics during interview, 2016. 

14 
56 

Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences/ Troy University/Menan Testimony/ 2019 

each year 17 • The need for plastics recycling is made evident in the above examples, and 

undeniably provides a case for a dedicated Center of research. 

Overall, the above questions and responses make visible significant lacunae in 

contemporary research in plastic recycling that can be efiectively translated to sustainable 

goals in the industry. The Center will focus on the short, medium and long term issues to be 

resolved to negate these existing gaps. The specific projects will be carefully selected. 

prioritized and undertaken in partnership with industry, community and other stakeholders. 

Troy University is located in close proximity to KW Plastics-the world's largest 

plastics recycling company. In the recent years, owing to shortcomings in the private sector, 

KW Plastics has reached out to the faculty in the School of Science and Technology at Troy 

University for help in developing advanced capabilities in sorting technology and recycling 

chemistry. Additionally, the logistics involved in collecting a larger sample of used plastics 

also remains an open issue for the plastic industry in general. The nearly zero-carbon footprint 

technology of plastics recycling must be scaled up to meet the demands of global waste 

reduction. Ultimately, the Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences at Troy 

University will identify, develop and implement solutions to the problems in contemporary 

plastics industry by linking academia, industry, and community. 

************************* 

17 Recycling in Griffin Creates Jobs in Georgia". www.cityofgriffin.gov., 2015. 

15 
57 

Govind Menon, Ph. D. 

Brief Biography 

After completing his schooling in India, Govind Menon moved to the United States in 1997 to 

pursue an undergraduate degree in Mathematics at Troy University. Subsequently, he joined the 

Physics Department at the University of Alabama in Birmingham for his master's and doctoral 

degrees in Physics to specialize in General Relativity. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on developing 

a non-axisymmetric spacetime that permitted gravitational repulsion. During the last year of his 

graduate training, Menon procured a lectureship at his alma mater--Troy University. Now, in his 

twenty third year at the unh-ersity, he is professor of physics, and chair of the Department of 

Chemistry and Physics. Recently, ]\Ienon was appointed the founding director of the School of 

Science and Technology at Troy University. 

Menon's summer sabbaticals at the Naval Research Lab in \'\'ashington D.C. have consumed a large 

portion of his research efforts in the recent years. I!e works on the active magnetospheres of 

supermassive black holes, and along with his collaborator Dr. Charles Dermer (Naval Research Lab), 

has produced the only known exact analytical solution to a stationary, axis-symmetric, force-free 

magnetosphere in a Kerr (rotating black hole) background. Their efforts have led to a manuscript 

entitled High-EmC?;J' Radiation From B!ark I foles: Gamma Rqys, Cosmic Rays· and Neutrinos published by 

Princeton Cniversity Press. When Menon is not working on Physics or spending time with his 

family, he can be found in his study playing classical guitar. 
58 

Chairwoman STEVENS. Dr. Beckham. 

TESTIMONY OF DR. GREGG BECKHAM, 

SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW, 

NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY 

Dr. BECKHAM. Chairwoman Stevens, Ranking Member Baird, 

and Members of the Subcommittee, I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you today to discuss the critical need for 

plastics recycling and upcycling and how foundational science can 

contribute to this. It has the potential both to protect our Nation’s 

environment, as well as strengthen the economy. 

So briefly today what I’ll address is primarily around two questions. One is how do we deal with the plastics that we generate 

today, and the second is how do we make tomorrow’s plastics recyclable by design? 

So plastics, as certainly echoed in the opening remarks, are essential to modern life. We rely on them, and they made our lives 

better. As we all know, though, they’re choking our world’s oceans, 

they’re killing aquatic and terrestrial life, they’re in the air we 

breathe and the food that we eat. And certainly reducing individual 

plastic use must be part of the solution, but plastics should not be 

demonized. 

On top of this, today’s recycling industry, from my perspective, 

being mostly mechanical in nature, is a downcycling operation. 

When you put this PET bottle into the recycling bin, if it is recycled, it’s much lower in value because its material properties are 

compromised, and it will tend to go to things that are lower value 

like carpet or clothing, which still ultimately end up in the landfill. 

And so there’s a very little—in my opinion, very little economic incentive now to do plastics recycling with the current paradigms we 

use. Of course, we all know that China has recently banned the imports of plastic waste as well, which is causing massive stress on 

existing domestic recycling. And so we need to think beyond today’s 

recycling paradigm. 

And our ultimate goal, as, again, was echoed in the opening 

statements, is to develop foundational science that can transition 

us from a linear flow-through economy where this is sourced from 

petroleum and put into the trash or the recycling bin and likely is 

still not recycled but downcycled to an economy that is circular 

such that this material could stay in continuous use. 

And to this end, chemical recycling or the use of catalysts, microbes, or enzymes to break down plastics into building blocks and 

then build them back up into new, virgin-like materials offers a 

more sustainable, innovative, and I think profitable approach 

around which we can completely rebuild and rethink the American 

recycling industry. 

Plastics breakdown is very similar to the breakdown of waste 

plant material like agricultural residues that you would find from 

corn stover, for example. Plastics are diffusely distributed just like 

biomass is. They’re costly to recover just like biomass. They’re also 

incredibly durable and hard to break down, just like cellulose is. 

It’s the reason why cows need four stomachs and we don’t get any 

caloric value from celery, for example. 
59 

The advent of a lignocellulose-based economy, as all of you know, 

required sustained investment in science and engineering and technology, and over the last 40 years, there have massive gains in the 

viability of biomass conversion such that the United States and the 

world I think is on the cusp of utilizing biomass for renewable 

fuels, chemicals, and materials. Dealing with plastics, just like with 

biomass, will require sustained commitment to develop these viable 

processes. 

One obvious option in the case of chemical recycling is to take 

this PET bottle and convert it back into a PET bottle that has the 

same properties. This PET bottle could be broken down using 

chemical catalysts or enzymes into its building blocks and put it 

back into another bottle like this. 

Conversely, and I think more interestingly, there’s a potential for 

the concept of plastics upcycling, so put this into the recycle bin, 

break it down into building blocks, and then put it into something 

that has a much longer lifetime and a much higher value. For example, this PET bottle can be turned into building blocks that will 

go into a composite material in a car. It can go into a wind turbine. 

It can be made into Kevlar. It could be made into other things like 

this. 

This idea of upcycling or the creation of more valuable product 

from a waste material I think will incentivize the economics of 

plastics reclamation, which is really what we ultimately need. And 

examples like this need to be developed to help stem the flow of 

plastics into the environment and to landfills. 

Second, today, most plastics are made from petroleum-based 

building blocks with recycling as an afterthought. This is of course 

unsustainable. Foundational science in the last decade or so, especially funded in the United States has demonstrated an accessible 

bio-based building block portfolio around which we can source new 

materials to make bio-based plastics. 

At the same time that we’re building new plastics, we need to 

think about how they can be recyclable by design at the end of 

their life. And in this redesigning new materials from bio-based resources, we should inherently design these materials to be recyclable at the end of their lifetime. 

In summary, more research is urgently needed in the concept of 

plastics upcycling and enabling recyclable-by-design plastics. In the 

last episode of the Blue Planet II, which some of you may have 

seen, Sir David Attenborough remarks, quote, ‘‘We are at a unique 

stage in our history. Never before have we had such an awareness 

of what we’re doing to the planet and never before have we had the 

power to do something about that. Surely we have a responsibility 

to care for our blue planet. The future of humanity and indeed all 

life on earth now depends on us.’’ He was talking about the plastics 

problem in this case. 

So in my opinion, dedicated, aggressive, and federally supported 

R&D investment that harnesses the innovation of the U.S. research 

community must be brought to bear to deal with today’s plastics 

through the development of chemical recycling of today’s plastics, 

as well as thinking about how to make tomorrow’s plastics recyclable by design. Developing processes that can achieve this economic 
60 

viability should enable the creation of a completely new industry 

in the United States and enable millions of jobs. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Beckham follows:] 
61 

Prepared Statement of Dr. Gregg T. Beckham 

Senior Research Fellow 

National Bioenergy Center 

National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

For the House Science, Space & Technology Committee 

Subcommittee on Research and Technology 

April 30, 2019 

Chairwoman Stevens, Ranking Member Baird, and members ofthe Subcommittee, thank you for 

this exciting opportunity to discuss the critical need for emphasis on plastics reclamation, 

recycling, and upcycling and how new technology investments have the potential to protect our 

nation's environment and strengthen our industrial competitiveness. 

Introduction 

My name is Gregg T. Beckham, and I am currently a Senior Research Fellow in the National 

Bioenergy Center at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy 

Laboratory, or NREL, in Golden, Colorado. In 2007, I obtained my PhD. at the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology and started my research career at NREL almost immediately. I began 

leading a research group in 2011 focused on using biology, chemistry, and chemical engineering 

to solve some of the most pressing energy and environmental problems facing our nation. In 

particular, my group has been focused on developing renewable energy technologies to advance 

biofuels, biochemicals, and biomaterials sourced from lignocellulosic biomass-the plant matter 

that is abundant in the United States. This work is done in collaboration with academic institutions 

throughout the United States and all over the world, other DOE national laboratories, and with 

industrial partners from startups to large multinational companies. 

Broadly speaking, the science and engineering research conducted at NREL, and at many U.S. 

research institutions and universities, on biomass conversion can readily be applied to 

overcoming the waste plastics problem. More recently, I have been co-leading a growing 

international collaborative team focused on employing biomass conversion science and 

engineering to overcome the global environmental problem of plastics waste. Our goal is to create 

a more circular materials economy, both nationally and globally, that minimizes waste by keeping 

materials in continuous use. Many of the scientific concepts developed for biomass conversion 

are also used for plastics conversion. For example, lignocellulosic biomass, which is derived from 

agricultural residues and timber waste, is a diffuse, solid, and diverse feedstock that is highly 

resistant to breakdown and is of relatively low value. Plastics are conceptually quite similar, as I 

will describe in more detail below. 

Overall, these projects and collaborations have provided me with an understanding of how 

biology, chemistry, and chemical engineering principles can potentially be applied-with 

increased emphasis and federal investment-to help the United States lead the way in developing 

robust, industrially relevant solutions to stem this growing environmental crisis of plastics waste 

and to ultimately enable a more circular materials economy. 

I was invited here today to discuss with you the broader needs, opportunities, and challenges for 

research, development, and deployment in chemical recycling technologies and to highlight how 

universities, government research laboratories, industry, and local governments can spur 
62 

innovation in this space and "close the loop" on plastics recycling. Although I will highlight specific 

examples relevant to my group's work at NREL, the broader lessons and capabilities will be 

applicable to many of the nation's biologists, chemists, chemical engineers, and experts in related 

fields. Briefly, we must address two questions: How do we handle the stream of plastics we 

generate today and how do we design the plastics of tomorrow for recyclability-by-design? 

Plastics are creating a global environmental catastrophe 

Plastics are everywhere, and they are essential to modern life. Some of the initial plastics were 

actually developed to avoid the use of ivory and, thus, were motivated by an environmental and 

conservation perspective. Today, more than 300 million metric tons of plastics are produced each 

year. Almost all of these are derived from fossil-based resources and ultimately based on 

byproducts from petroleum refining, ethylene, propylene, and benzene. Humankind uses these 

versatile, robust materials for myriad things-for example, to keep water clean, prevent infection 

in hospitals, protect and prolong the life of food, lightweight vehicles and airplanes, and also as 

fibers in clothing and carpeting, bio-compatible materials for human health, major components in 

renewable energy and electricity generation and for other applications. Indeed, an amusing 

experiment that anyone can do is to note every single piece of plastic you touch just as you get 

ready for work; you will soon get tired of taking notes (probably with a plastic pen). The amount 

of plastics in our daily lives is simply daunting and something that many of us take for granted. It 

is undoubtedly the case that plastic materials will continue to be used in various forms for the 

entirety of the next century. In the developing world, where the middle class is on the rise, the use 

of plastics will grow. 

Given their low cost, extraordinary durability, and utility in so many applications, plastics are also 

accumulating at alarming rates in the world's landfills. The statistics are truly staggering. Experts 

have estimated that 8.3 billion metric tons of plastics have been made and approximately 5 billion 

metric tons have already been discarded, with an abysmal recycling rate of only 600 million metric 

tons. This is despite the fact that recycling alone can save 40 to 90 percent of the inherent energy 

in plastics relative to the production of virgin plastics-energy savings, which if harnessed, could 

result in massive-scale economic advantages. Moreover, many plastics are produced for singleuse packaging. Up to 40 percent of all plastics are used for minutes to hours to days in single-use 

packaging applications, while the estimated time for many plastics to degrade in a landfill is 

centuries to millennia. 

Besides choking landfills, plastics are also entering the environment at increasingly alarming 

rates, perhaps most strikingly in the world's oceans. It is estimated that over 7 million metric tons 

of plastics enter the ocean every year, a significant portion of which is in the developing world in 

coastal regions and through major freshwater entry points into the oceans. From there, plastics 

enter natural food chains, poisoning sea life from pole to pole through the ingestion of plastics by 

sea life. To put this into context, 7 million metric tons of plastics per year entering the oceans is 

the equivalent of a dump truck of plastics entering the ocean per minute, all year round. Based 

on this statistic, the projected population growth, and the projected upward economic mobility of 

the global middle class, a survey led by researchers at the University of Georgia estimated that 

by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by mass. Given the reliance of the planet 

on the health of the world's oceans, this staggering prediction should give us all pause. 
63 

Plastics in the environment are by no means limited to polluting the world's oceans. Microplastics 

are found far and wide in the soil and in the entirety of the global food chain, polluting what we 

once considered pristine freshwater bodies, and, as highlighted in a study released just this 

month, they are carried in the air we breathe. Given the amount of plastics in the food chain, 

plastics are commonly now found in the human body, with potential toxicological effects that are 

not yet fully understood. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to read or listen to the news and not hear 

about this problem. Although plastics currently in the biosphere will likely subsist for centuries and 

millennia, urgent action on a global scale will be required to stem the tide of plastics that enter our 

controlled landfills, the natural world, and even our own bodies. 

Current recycling infrastructure is failing 

Since plastics have come into circulation, various forms of a recycling industry have developed 

around the world, catalyzed by social pressures, governmental regulations, and in some cases 

economic motivations. However, nearly all recycling today is mechanical in nature. For example, 

a water bottle-a common, single-use plastic mostly comprising polyethylene terephthalate (PET, 

recycling code #1)-when recycled, will typically be sorted from other plastics, have the label and 

cap removed, be washed, and then chopped into flakes. Depending on the color (clear or green), 

the reclaimed PET plastic will then be heated up and extruded into a new PET plastic that will 

typically exhibit compromised material properties relative to virgin, bottle-grade PET. This means 

that reclaimed, recycled PET will typically go into applications such as polyester carpet or clothing. 

While this represents a second life for the plastic, the value of the reclaimed PET is significantly 

lower than that of virgin, bottle-grade PET, and in many cases, the plastic will still ultimately end 

up in a landfill. Thus, most recycling of this nature can be thought of as "downcycling." 

Beyond this, China's passage of their "National Sword" policy banned the imports of most waste 

plastics from North America and the European Union into that nation. Many of the "recycled" 

plastics in the United States were considered and counted as "recycled" before 2018 if they were 

sent to China. The passage of the National Sword policy is causing overflows and massive stress 

on the existing, domestic supply chains. While a major upset in the flow of reclaimed plastics, this 

policy also presents a significant opportunity for the United States (and more broadly, many 

countries in the developed world) to rethink and reinvent the recycling value and supply chain 

toward a more circular materials economy. 

Recycling and upcycling technologies provide potential solutions 

As noted above, plastics recycling today is mostly mechanical. Alternative strategies for 

recovering and reclaiming value from plastics should be examined as soon as possible to address 

the problem of dealing with today's waste plastics. For example, some countries, such as Sweden 

and Austria, already reclaim and burn a significant amount of the waste plastics generated. 

Energy recovery from waste plastics, in many cases, is able to circumvent the need for sorting 

heterogeneous materials from one another and is a cost-effective strategy. Yet in an era of cheap 

natural gas and renewable electrons coming onto the grid, energy recovery from plastics 

represents a baseline and likely a non-sustainable means to recover value from plastics. In many 

regions of the United States, this will be little better than current mechanical recycling or simply 

landfilling plastics. Moreover, emissions from plastics combustion, beyond carbon dioxide, often 

contain toxic metals resulting from specific polymerization catalysts, causing yet another potential 
64 

environmental cleanup problem while simultaneously adding to the amount of carbon dioxide in 

the atmosphere. 

Instead, the use of chemical recycling-using catalysts to break plastics down to their building 

blocks and build them back into new, virgin-like materials-offers a more sustainable, innovative, 

and profitable approach around which we can completely rebuild the American recycling industry. 

Let's address several aspects of what this could look like. 

First, why is chemical recycling not already used today? As mentioned earlier, the breakdown of 

plastics is similar to the breakdown of lignocellulosic biomass. Especially in consumer applications 

like packaging, plastics are diffusely distributed and often are costly to recover. They are similar 

to agricultural residues produced on American farmland. Plastics are also incredibly durable and 

hard to break back down to their building blocks, just like cellulose is in plants. The genesis and 

continued development of plastic materials almost universally focuses only on "during lifetime" 

properties, with end-of-life considerations being an afterthought. Thus, plastics are inherently hard 

to break down and existing approaches to do so are, for the most part, not yet commercial. 

Drawing on the parallels to biomass conversion, the advent of a lignocellulosic-based economy 

has required sustained and continued investment in the scientific and engineering enterprises, 

and over the last 40 years, massive gains in efficiency, process designs, and economic viability 

of biomass conversion now has the United States and the world on the cusp of utilizing biomass 

as a foundation for renewable fuels, chemicals, and materials. The stubborn problem of today's 

plastics, like lignocellulosic biomass, will require sustained commitment to develop viable 

processes, but the urgency of this problem is clear. 

Chemical recycling can be envisioned in many variations, and the type of process design 

ultimately employed will depend on many factors, including the type of plastic being chemically 

processed. For example, PET (recycling code #1) exhibits a very different chemical structure from 

polyethylene (recycling codes #2 and #4, depending on the form) and polypropylene (recycling 

code #5), and, thus, will require significantly different types of processes to be developed. The 

types of catalysts and processing conditions used in chemical recycling will likely vary significantly 

also based on the type of plastic being targeted. Ideally, chemical recycling processes will be able 

to handle mixed waste plastic streams, and the ability of a process to selectively extract one 

building block from mixed plastics streams will help avoid upstream sorting costs in a processa key driver for process viability and robustness. Given the ability to develop new processes from 

a completely fresh perspective, adherence to the principles of green chemistry and green 

engineering should be followed and designed into theoretical process concepts. 

New developments in catalysis to break down plastics will certainly be required. Thus, the 

development of robust, scalable, economically viable processes will require advances in chemical 

catalysis and related fields. Engagement with industry and formation of key partnerships will be 

essential to ensure the viability of catalytic approaches. Chemical recycling may also include 

biological elements as well, and indeed, the United States is a world leader in the development 

of advanced industrial biotechnology. This may include elements such as engineered or evolved 

enzymes to break down plastics, or the use of engineered microbes to break down plastics and 

turn the deconstruction products into new building blocks. As an example, NREL and an 

international team recently engineered a natural enzyme for improved PET biodegradation, and 

we are working now with a large group of collaborators in the United States and Europe to find 
65 

even better enzymes that can operate at much higher temperatures as would be needed for 

industrial utility. We have also engineered a microbe to be able to produce enzymes that break 

down plastics and then convert the deconstruction products into higher-value materials, such as 

composite materials for snowboards. 

Regardless of the approach for chemical plastics upcycling, scale-up will be a critical component 

of the research and development in this space. A potential advantage for plastics, relative to 

biomass, is that many places in the United States already have reclamation facilities with 

infrastructure in place to collect and process plastics in centralized facilities. How chemical 

recycling links to the current recycling infrastructure will be a key consideration. 

Another major question in chemical recycling is: What do we do with the breakdown products? 

Among several, one obvious and oft-cited option is to use chemical recycling to break down a 

plastic and turn it back into the same exact plastic with virgin-like materials properties. This would 

then ideally result in a closed-loop circular materials flow. For example, IBM has developed an 

innovative chemical recycling process where they can break PET down to building blocks that 

can be reprocessed into PET bottles with properties akin to virgin PET bottles for carbonated 

beverages or water. For processes like this, economics will be a key driver in terms of whether 

the cost for chemical recycling makes sense relative to buying virgin plastics that have never been 

used in an application before. 

Conversely, instead of having a closed-loop cycle for a single plastic, another option in chemical 

recycling is the concept of upcycling. Upcycling is the creation of a more valuable product from a 

waste material. In the same example, perhaps the breakdown products frorn a PET bottle 

depolymerization process could go into a higher-value, longer-lifetime material, instead of being 

put back into the PET supply chain. If the upcycled product has more value than the reclaimed 

and recycled plastic, this may be an early and easier way to produce market pull for reclaiming 

and breaking down plastics using chemical recycling. Several key elements must be considered 

here, including: Does the upcycled material have any inherent advantage over making the same 

material from virgin sources? For example, if an upcycled material can rnore easily and more 

cheaply be made from virgin building blocks derived from petroleum, it will be challenging to create 

an economic incentive for upcycling. 

Another key consideration in plastics upcycling is: What is the market size for the upcycled 

material? For example, if PET is being converted into a composite that could be used as a car 

part, how does the demand in scale align with that of PET bottles that can be reclaimed? If the 

market size is considerably smaller, then multiple upcycling solutions will likely need to be 

developed to justify the reclamation of waste plastics. In my group at NREL, for instance, we have 

developed a robust process to convert PET plastic found in single-use water bottles into highstrength composite materials that could be used in high-performance applications like in a wind 

turbine blade or vehicle parts. The selling price of reclaimed PET is between $0.31 and $0.51 per 

pound, whereas composite materials like we made sell for around $2.50 per pound, representing 

a considerable upcycling potential. Examples like this will need to be developed and scaled in 

collaboration with industry to make these ideas into a reality that helps stem the flow of plastics 

into the environment and also incentivizes the economics of reclamation. 
66 

Regardless of what kind of processes are developed, judicious techno-economic analysis and 

life-cycle assessment must be a key part of the research portfolio. Doing these kinds of analyses 

"early and often" can best inform the research community as to the main research areas to focus 

on to be most impactful. These kinds of tools are universally applied in the industrial chemical 

processing fields, and they will be critical for the development of a new recycling and upcycling 

industry based on chemical recycling. In addition, resource assessments will be another critical 

component of this endeavor. Identifying and understanding the current supply chains, where 

plastics are collected, and where they are currently recycled will help industry identify new 

opportunities and existing reclamation infrastructure for investment into chemical recycling 

technologies. 

Transforming the plastics of tomorrow to be recyclable-by-design 

Today, most plastics are made from petroleum-based building blocks with recycling as an 

afterthought relative to lifetime performance and application. This is undoubtedly an unsustainable 

approach for the long-term health of the nation and the planet Beyond developing robust 

chemical recycling and upcycling strategies that deal with the plastics we make now, we also 

urgently need a transition to sustainably sourced building blocks for plastics, and we need to 

simultaneously develop plastics that are recyclable-by-design. This will require a fundamental 

shift in our materials economy. 

In terms of new building blocks, research done in the United States and globally in the last two 

decades has identified a large portfolio of accessible bio-based building blocks that can be derived 

from waste agricultural residues, waste wood from the timber industry, or produced from 

dedicated energy crops. Similar building blocks can be made from algae or waste organic 

materials (e.g., food waste) for producing similar new building blocks. Work from our group at 

NREL, for example, has produced completely new building block molecules that can go into highvalue performance materials such as improved nylons for automotive applications. As another 

example, work from the Center for Biorenewable Chemicals, led from Iowa State University, also 

developed a range of new bio-based chemicals that can be leveraged for new plastics 

applications. 

The sourcing of new building blocks for materials from bio-based resources is timely and critically 

needed. While thinking about redesigning new materials from bio-based resources, we also 

should inherently design these materials to be recyclable-by-design, not as an afterthought. For 

example, separate works from IBM, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Colorado State 

University, among others, have developed materials that can serve in the place of petroleumsourced plastics today but can also be infinitely recycled. The ability, for example, to recycle a 

computer case into its building blocks easily and chemically could then enable turning that plastic 

into something completely different, such as a car panel. Innovation in this space, namely the 

combination of renewably sourced building blocks and plastics that are recyclable-by-design will 

solve the problem of what to do about "tomorrow's" plastics. Further research and innovation are 

desperately needed in this space, especially in collaboration with industry, academia, and 

government research institutions. 

More research is urgently needed in plastics 

In Episode 7 of the BBC series Blue Planet II, Sir David Attenborough remarked: 
67 

"We are at a unique stage in our history. Never before have we had such an 

awareness of what we are doing to the planet, and never before have we had the 

power to do something about that. Surely, we have a responsibility to care for our 

blue planet. The future of humanity and, indeed, all life on Earth, now depends on 

us." 

This is absolutely the case with the plastics pollution problem. These versatile materials are now 

choking the world's oceans, killing aquatic and terrestrial life, and in the air we breathe and the 

food we eat. While reducing our individual plastic use, especially single-use packaging, must be 

part of the solution, plastic materials are truly useful and provide benefits to many aspects of 

modern life. This means plastics will not go away anytime soon. 

Dedicated investment that harnesses the innovation of the United States research community 

needs to be applied to dealing with Ieday's plastics through both the development of chemical 

recycling and re-engineering tomorrow's plastics to be recyclable-by-design. Developing robust 

processes that can reach economic viability rapidly would enable creation of a completely new 

industry in the United States and result in millions of jobs. This would also establish the United 

States as a world leader to solve this global-scale problem. 

In a 2017 paper, Roland Geyer wrote that: "without a well-designed and tailor-made management 

strategy for end-of-life plastics, humans are conducting a singular uncontrolled experiment on a 

global scale, in which billions of metric tons of material will accumulate across all major terrestrial 

and aquatic ecosystems on the planet." Aggressive federally supported R&D programs in this 

area will maximize the nation's economic and environmental benefits, for decades to come. 
68 

Gregg T. Beckham is a Senior Research Fellow at NREL. He received his PhD in Chemical 

Engineering at MIT in 2007. He currently leads and works with an interdisciplinary team of 

biologists, chemists, and engineers at NREL on conversion of biomass to chemicals and 

materials and in the area of plastics upcycling. He has published 163 peer-reviewed articles 

since 2007 and was awarded the ACS Open Eye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, the AIChE 

Computational Science and Engineering Forum Young Investigator Award, the ACS Sustainable 

Chemistry and Engineering Lectureship, the SIMS Young Investigator Award, an R&DlOO Award, 

and the Beilby Medal and Prize. He is on the Editorial Board of theJournal of Biological 

Chemistry and the Editorial Advisory Board of Microbial Biotechnology and ACS Sustainable 

Chemistry and Engineering. He is also the founding chair of the Lignin Gordon Research 

Conference. 
69 

Chairwoman STEVENS. Mr. Boven. 

TESTIMONY OF TIM BOVEN, 

RECYCLING COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, 

PACKAGING AND SPECIALTY PLASTICS, DOW 

Mr. BOVEN. Chairwoman Stevens, Ranking Member Baird, Members of the Subcommittee, it’s my privilege to address you on the 

topic of ‘‘Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastic Recycling.’’ My name is Tim Boven. I am the Recycling Commercial Director at Dow in our Packaging and Specialty Plastics business. My 

organization is responsible for business solutions that enable a circular economy. 

Right now, what’s been said, we live in primarily a linear economy where the goods we use every day are manufactured from raw 

materials, sold, used, and then discarded. Applying the principles 

of circular economy will allow us to optimize resources to minimize 

the extraction of new raw materials and ultimately reduce the 

amount of waste going to landfills. 

Recycling is foundational for circularity, and it’s good for the 

economy. Investment in mechanical and chemical recycling will 

spur domestic investment supporting business growth. If widely 

adopted, advanced recycling processes could result in growth in 

new U.S. jobs and economic output. Dow believes plastics are too 

valuable to be lost as waste, and as such, innovation is needed to 

retain its value. 

Plastics provided many benefits to society, including reducing 

food waste, improving energy efficiency, reducing material usage, 

and improving functionality. What society needs and where the industry is now focusing is on effective recycling solutions that retain 

the value of plastic after its initial use. 

Collection is a key step in the recycling process. If the material 

is not collected effectively, it cannot be recycled. The U.S. recycling 

system is highly fragmented and variable, resulting in unequal access and confusion. The challenge equates to high contamination 

levels in collected recycling. Much of the U.S. has a single-stream 

collection with sorting left to material recovery facilities, or MRFs. 

Many MRFs are privately owned, and their capabilities vary widely. Most were designed for paper, glass, and metal. Technology and 

process improvements are needed in this space to improve the 

quality and consistency of the plastic coming from these facilities. 

Once we have collected it, we can recycle it. Plastics can often 

be much more challenging to recycle than other materials because 

of its low density and wide range of plastics collected, which may 

be incompatible. Innovation is needed to improve the ability of 

equipment to sort and process hard-to-recycle materials. 

Two terms commonly used to describe plastic recycling are mechanical recycling and chemical or feedstock recycling. Traditional 

mechanical recycling is an excellent first step in getting the value 

from used plastic and has environmental benefits. However, mechanical recycling has a significant limitation in the end-product 

performance and is only suitable for a limited number of high-volume applications. It is extremely difficult to remove all the contaminants such as dirt, inks, fibers, adhesives, et cetera. All are included in the recycling stream. All impact performance. 
70 

Dow is a supporting innovation in mechanical recycling through 

application development, high-performance material development, 

allowing for the incorporation of PCR (post-consumer recycled plastic), compatibilization technology to minimize contamination. Even 

with these advances, mechanical recycling of all plastics is a significant challenge, particularly in high-end applications like those 

that require FDA approval. 

These challenges require innovation that cannot be addressed 

with processes like feedstock recycling. Feedstock recycling is an 

advanced recycling process of depolymerizing a plastic back to its 

original building blocks where it can be then introduced into the 

front end of the polymer manufacturing process. This process is 

very similar to paper recycling where it’s taken back to fiber. Feedstock recycling has the potential to produce recycled plastic with 

virgin-like performance capable of being used in the most stringent 

applications. Dow is actively researching plastic conversion processes of pyrolysis and gasification. We have projects ranging from 

process technology through the effective conversion to plastic. 

Increasing recycling rates and expanding the materials collected 

will not happen on its own, and there are important steps Congress 

can take to enable growth in this sector. This includes support on 

uniform definitions on recycling so that new technology is not precluded, standards for mass-balance accounting to certify recycled 

plastic content, recycling infrastructure funding, and to support in 

the development of new end markets for recycled plastic. I’ve expanded on these topics in my written statement. 

In conclusion, thank you for your time and the opportunity to 

testify on this important topic. We believe the public and private 

sectors can partner together to advance innovation and accelerate 

recycling. Dow looks forward to working with Congress on these 

issues and answering any questions the Committee may have. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Boven follows:] 
71 

Testimony of Tim J. Boven 

Recycling Commercial Director for the Americas, Packaging & Specialty Plastics, 

Dow 

Introduction 

Before the Subcommittee on Research & Technology 

Committee on Science, Space and Technology 

U.S. House of Representatives 

Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastic Recycling 

April 3D, 2019 

Chairwoman Stevens and Ranking Member Baird, and members of the Subcommittee, it is my 

privilege to address you on the topic of "Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastic 

Recycling." My Name is Tim Boven, and I am the Recycling Commercial Director for the 

Americas for Dow's Packaging and Specialty Plastics business. Dow is a leading global 

producer of polyolefin plastics. My organization is responsible for driving business solutions that 

enable a circular economy. I have 22 years of experience with Dow in a wide range of roles 

ranging from R&D, Thermoplastic Technical Service and Development, Sales and Marketing, 

Supply Chain, and several Business leadership positions. In my current role I have 

accountability for Dow's recycling platform that combines material science and application 

technology to improve plastic circularity. Dow has one of the strongest and broadest toolkits in 

the industry, with robust technology, asset integration, scale and competitive capabilities that 

enable us to address complex global issues. All of this enables Dow to deliver on our 

commitment to support plastic circularity. 

Value Proposition to Advancing a Circular Economy 

Right now, we live primarily in a linear economy where the goods we use every day are 

manufactured from raw materials, sold, used, and then discarded as waste. Dow is engaged in 

the transition from a linear economy to one that redesigns, recycles, reuses, and 

remanufactures to keep materials in their highest value use for as long as possible. As a result, 

we will preserve our resources in a "circular economy" making the most of our natural 

resources. Applying the principles of a circular economy will allow us to optimize the use and 

reuse of resources to minimize the extraction of new raw materials and ultimately reduce the 

amount of waste that goes into landfills. 

Recycling is foundational for circularity and is good for the Economy. According to the report, 

"Economic Impact of Advanced Plastics Recycling and Recovery Facilities in the U.S.," if widely 

adopted, advanced recycling processes could result in nearly forty thousand direct and indirect 

U.S. jobs, as much as $2.2 billion in annual payroll, and another $9.9 billion in direct and indirect 

economic output.' Dow believes that manufacturing is the lifeblood of U.S. economic growth 

and strongly supports the subject of today's hearing. Investment in mechanical and chemical 

recycling will spur domestic investment and US jobs, while supporting business growth and the 

circular economy. Innovation in advanced recycling is important to the US manufacturing sector 

and has the potential to positively address many of the challenges facing this country including 

maintaining technology leadership and promoting global competitiveness. 

1 https://plastics.americanchemistry.com/Economic-lmpact-of-Advanced-Piastics-Recycling-aod-RecoveryFacilities-in_:t.be-United-States.pdf 
72 

Dow's 2025 Sustainability Goals 

In 2015, Dow embarked on its third and most ambitious set of 10-year sustainability goals- the 

2025 Sustainability Goals. Dow's sustainability journey has evolved from focusing on 

operational efficiency (footprint), to product solutions to world challenges (handprint), to 

recognizing that only through collaboration can we join others to accelerate the progress toward 

a sustainable planet (blueprint). The 2025 goals are centered around building blueprints for a 

sustainable planet, which are aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and integrate 

public policy solutions, science and technology, and value chain innovation. The aim is to build 

solutions between government, business and society that generate shared values and are long 

lasting, scalable and transformative. We know there are others who share our blueprint vision, 

and we want to join existing conversations and convene new ones on how we as companies 

and organizations can accelerate sustainable practices through collaboration. 

Dow's 2025 goals are designed to harness Dow's innovation strengths, global reach and the 

passion of our employees to expand the Company's impact around the world, driving 

unprecedented collaborations to develop societal blueprints that will facilitate the transition to a 

sustainable planet and society. Our 2025 sustainability goals include: 

Leading the Blueprint- Dow leads in developing societal blueprints that integrate public 

policy solutions, science and technology, and value chain innovation to facilitate the 

transition to a sustainable planet and society. 

Advancing a Circular Economy - Dow advances a circular economy by delivering 

solutions to close the resource loops in key markets. 

• Safe Materials for a Sustainable Planet - We envision a future where every material we 

bring to market is sustainable for our people and our planet. 

World-Leading Operations Performance - Dow maintains world-leading operations 

performance in natural resource efficiency, environment, health and safety. 

Delivering Breakthrough Innovations - Dow delivers breakthrough sustainable chemistry 

innovations that advance the well-being of humanity. 

Valuing Nature - Dow applies a business decision process that values nature, which will 

deliver business value and natural capital value through projects that are good for 

business and better for ecosystems. 

Engaging for Impact: Communities, Employees, Customers - Dow people worldwide 

directly apply their passion and expertise to advance the well-being of people and the 

planet. To achieve these bold and aggressive sustainability targets, Dow is harnessing 

its innovation strengths, global reach and dedicated employee population. 

With these goals, Dow has committed to helping facilitate the world's transition to a circular 

economy, through innovation and collaboration, where waste and pollution are designed out of 

new products and services. Our goal is to advance a circular economy by delivering solutions to 

close the resource loops in key markets, where we maximize the utility of existing molecules 

through recycling and reuse. 

Opportunities in the Plastic Circular Economy 

Dow believes plastic is too valuable to be lost as waste and as such innovation is needed to 

retain its value. Plastics offer sustainability benefits over other readily available alternatives in 

many applications. For example, plastic packaging typically has four to seven times fewer 
73 

greenhouse gas emissions compared to alternative packaging materials. 2 The sustainability 

footprint of plastic is one of the key drivers of its rapid growth over the last few decades. 

Plastics provide many benefits including reducing food waste, improving energy efficiency, 

reducing material usage, and improving functionality, all at a lower cost. What society needs 

and where the industry is now focusing is on effective recycling solutions that retain the value of 

plastic after initial use. 

Since plastics are relatively new compared to alternative materials such as paper, glass, and 

metal, and are made with relatively little material, there has been less focus on recycling 

solutions. Much of the recycling infrastructure in the U.S. was built around fiber, metal and 

glass. We must do a better job of capturing the residual value of plastics after initial use so that 

value is not lost through disposal in a landfill. To this end, we are engaged in numerous 

initiatives to "close the loop" and reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in the environment 

or is lost to landfill. 

We must work to capture and reuse plastic by scaling investments in collection, waste 

management, recycling technologies, and new end use markets for recycled plastics. In order 

to do this, it will be critical that solutions are designed for lowest environmental impact, with 

sufficient infrastructure to collect, technology to process, and delivered to markets that create 

new value for items that were once considered only disposable. 

Collection and Sortation Challenges in the US 

Collection is a key step in the recycling process. If material is not effectively collected it cannot 

be recycled. Dow, along with many other companies and individuals, has partnered with The 

Recycling Partnership to help improve education and collection through funding projects that 

expand recycling access and improve the quality of the collected stream. 

The U.S. recycling system is highly fragmented and variable, resulting in unequal access and 

confusion. In addition, much of the material that is collected and sorted in the U.S. was 

historically sold into the Chinese market for processing and re-use. Since China implemented 

new restrictions on imports of material for recycling, local U.S. facilities have struggled finding 

markets for the sorted material. This challenge is growing as other countries institute similar 

import restrictions. When recyclers lack profitable end markets domestically and internationally, 

they are not motivated to increase collection or invest in upgraded equipment. This can result in 

reduced collection, increased landfill use, and increased cost to residents and municipalities. 

This challenge is exacerbated by high contamination levels in the material collected for 

recycling. Much of the U.S. has single stream collection, with sorting left to material recovery 

facilities (MRFs). Many MRFs are privately owned and have widely varying sorting capabilities. 

Technology and process improvements are needed in this space to improve the quality and 

consistency of the material sorted and baled. 

Plastic Recycling Processes 

Plastic recycling is the process of recovering scrap or used plastic and reprocessing it into 

beneficial products. It is the foundation for a plastic circular economy, particularly as most 

plastic does not naturally biodegrade in the environment. Plastic can often be more challenging 

'https:/lplastics.americanchemistry.com/Reports-and-Publications/LCA-of-Piastic-Packaging-Compared-toSubstitutes.pdf 
74 

to recycle than other materials because of its low density and wide range of plastics collected 

(i.e. 1 through 7) which may be incompatible. Innovation is needed to improve the ability of 

equipment to sort and process hard to recycle materials. Two terms commonly used to 

describe plastic recycling are mechanical recycling and chemical recycling. The figure below is 

a simplified illustration of where the chemical and mechanical recycling processes return 

material back into the value chain. 

Mechanical Recycling 

Traditional mechanical recycling is an excellent first step in getting value from the used 

plastics and has significant environmental benefits. 3 Mechanical recycling can be 

deployed locally and with lower capital than feedstock or chemical recycling. However, 

mechanical recycling has a significant limitation in the end product performance and is 

only suitable for a limited number of high volume applications. Mechanical recycling 

inevitably adds additional heat histories to the polymer chain degrading the material's 

structure. At the same time, it is extremely difficult to remove all the contaminants (dirt, 

inks, fiber, adhesive, additives etc.) that are included in the recycled stream all of which 

impact performance. Dow is supporting innovation in mechanically recycled material 

through material and application development. We are working to develop large end 

markets where the performance of mechanically recycled product is adequate and fit for 

use. 

With regard to material science, Dow is working to develop high performance resins, 

additives and compatabilization technologies to minimize issues like cross-linking, high 

odor, and off-color that are commonly associated with recycled plastics. Dow's 

VERSIFYTM copolymers are an example of technology that is used to compatibilize 

polypropylene and polyethylene. These materials enhance the performance of recycled 

polyethylene contaminated with polypropylene to allow recycled content incorporation. 

Another development is Dow RETAINTM polymer modifiers which compatibilize EVOH 

and nylon polymers which are commonly used in food packaging for food preservation. 

Dow's RETAINTM polymers in EVOH-based packaging, coupled with high-performance 

polyethylene resins allow for a stand-up pouch to be accepted in the store drop off. 

Even with these advances, mechanical recycling of all plastics is a significant challenge 

because of the wide range of materials introduced into the recycling stream, complex 

multi-material plastic structures, additive packages, and heat degradation which occurs 

during processing. Plastic in this state does not work well in traditional mechanical 

recycling systems. Additionally, it is very difficult to produce mechanically recycled 

3 https://www.oregon.gov/deg/mm/production/Pages/Materials-Attributes.aspx 
75 

plastic that is compliant with Food and Drug Administration regulations. These 

challenges require innovation that can be addressed by feedstock recycling. 

Chemical I Feedstock Recycling 

Chemical or Feedstock Recycling is an advanced recycling process of depolymerizing a 

plastic resin back to its individual building blocks where it can then be introduced into the 

front end of the polymer manufacturing process. This process is very similar to the 

recycling of paper. When cardboard boxes are recycled, the box is not broken down 

into a flat piece of cardboard and re-folded to make a new box. Rather, collected 

boxboard undergoes a pulping process where the board is broken down to its original 

cellulosic fiber to be made into a new sheet that will be fabricated into a new box. 

Depolymerization of plastic takes it back to its original molecules that can be 

reconstructed into new plastic with virgin-like performance capable of being used in the 

most stringent applications. This process removes impurities and containments like 

inks, dyes, colorants, fiber, etc. that otherwise impede mechanically recycled polymer 

performance. 

Feedstock recycling is a broad term that refers to a range of approaches to return plastic 

to virgin or near-virgin quality. Solvolysis, gasification, and pyrolysis are types of 

feedstock recycling. Nylon and PET are particularly well-suited for the solyvolysis type of 

advanced recycling. This is a chemical solvent process that breaks the polymer into 

monomers. Polyolefins, the most widely used plastic, require a thermo-cracking process 

to break the carbon bonds of the long molecular polymer chains to the fundamental 

building blocks or monomers. Two technologies used for thermo cracking are pyrolysis 

and gasification. Pyrolysis heats plastic in the absence of oxygen, breaking it down into 

a mixed hydrocarbon stream that can be further processed into liquid fuel, liquid 

petrochemical feedstock or wax. 

Gasification also heats plastic, but at higher temperatures converting into synthesis gas 

(syngas). Gasification can accept a mixture of organic compounds (plastic, biomass, 

cellulosic, textiles), which expands the range of material accepted and simplifies 

collection and sortation. The syngas can be further converted into fuel or petrochemical 

feedstocks. These are both reasonably mature technologies; however, they have not 

been widely used to create new plastics. Process innovation is required to improve the 

quality of the syngas, reduce capital intensity and match to the scale required. Equally 

important are that new business models and value chain partners develop to find 

solutions for aggregation of discarded plastic to minimize prohibitive logistics costs. 

Dow is actively researching the plastic conversion processes of pyrolysis and gasification. We 

have projects ranging from process technology improvements through to effective conversion to 

polyolefin plastics. 

Collaboration and Partnerships 

Dow is committed to advancing a plastic circular economy and is working to multiply the impact 

of our efforts through numerous global and local collaborations with governments, NGOs, 

industry, our own employees, and other partners to bring forward solutions. 

Dow and others have partnered on the Materials Recovery for the Future (MRFF) project 

in Pennsylvania to demonstrate and bring advanced process technology to the sortation 
76 

process in this step of the value chain 4 The goal is to demonstrate that more material, 

flexible packaging in particular, can be collected curbside, and sortation can be 

improved, ultimately improving the bottom line for the facility while simultaneously 

collecting and using more recyclable material. Bringing these sorts of innovations to 

scale is an opportunity to support growth of U.S. recycling infrastructure in a way that will 

create U.S. jobs and support new industries. 

Dow worked with a local paving partner to construct polymer modified asphalt roads 

using post-consumer recycled plastic in Lake Jackson, Texas. Additional opportunities 

for incorporating recycled plastic into asphalt are moving forward in Michigan. This 

innovation offers a way to maintain or improve the performance benefits of traditional 

polymer modified asphalt, while lowering overall costs. 

In 2014, Dow and Reynolds Consumer Products, owners of the Hefty brand, initiated 

the Hefty® EnergyBag® program. Under this program, consumers bag their hard to 

recycle plastics (those not accepted as part of curbside recycling programs) in a highvisibility orange bag, that is then collected with the rest of their recyclables. The bags 

are then aggregated at the MRF and shipped to locations where they are converted back 

into end markets, such as fuel or other building products. This program diverts plastic 

from landfills and demonstrates that hard to recycle plastics can be collected at curbside 

and converted into energy, fuels or other feedstocks. The program is successfully 

operating in 3 U.S. cities (Omaha, Boise and Cobb County, GA) and to date has reached 

125,000 households, collected more than 536,000 bags, and diverted 357 metric tons of 

waste from reaching landfills- the equivalent of 1,700 barrels of diesel. 

Dow is a founding member of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW), a newly formed 

organization committing more than $1.5 billion over the next five years in multiple 

projects, including on-the-ground waste management and infrastructure development in 

the geographies needing it most, beginning in the Asia-Pacific region. 

Dow is a founding partner of the World Economic Forum's Global Plastics Action 

Partnership (GPAP), which is funded and supported by the governments of Canada and 

the United Kingdom, as well as several companies, to drive a public-private partnership 

focused on infrastructure development in areas where the rate of plastics waste leakage 

is the greatest. The first project was kicked off in Indonesia in March 2019, with projects 

expected in Ghana and Vietnam later this year. 

• Dow is working closely with the leading industry organizations in the U.S.- the 

Sustainable Packaging Coalition and the Association of Plastics Recyclers- to improve 

and increase recycling through education and awareness programs as well as provide 

technical guidance and resources. 

Together with several other major global brands, Dow became a founding investor in 

Circulate Capital's $100 million effort to incubate and finance companies and 

infrastructure that help waste from reaching the oceans. 

4 https:/lwww.materialsrecovervforthefuture.com[ 
77 

Dow has announced it will donate $1 million to the Ocean Conservancy over the next 

two years to support waste collection and recycling solutions in Southeast Asian 

countries. 

Policy Challenges 

Increasing recycling rates and expanding the materials collected will not happen on its own, and 

there are important steps Congress can take to enable growth in this sector. 

Definitions: Advanced plastics recycling and recovery facilities that deploy gasification 

or pyrolysis technology should be universally defined and accepted as recycling. 

Definitions of recycling should be broad and technology neutral, so as not to prevent the 

development and deployment of new technologies. 

Standards: Increasing the capacity of advanced plastics recycling will require 

implementation of an industry-wide mass-balance based accounting system to certify 

plastic recycled content. During the chemical recycling process, plastic resins are 

depolymerized and fed back into the manufacturing process, at which time it is combined 

with virgin inputs. At this point there is no molecular difference between the recycled 

material and virgin material, and impossible to distinguish one from another. In order to 

make claims regarding or certify compliance with recycled content requirements, 

industry needs an accounting system in place to track substances through the 

manufacturing process. 

Recycling Infrastructure: Adequate recycling infrastructure both at the local collection 

level and in sorting and process- is a major barrier to increasing recycling rates among 

the public. Dow and the industry welcome the opportunity to partner with Congress on 

incentivizing investment in new recycling infrastructure at the federal, state, and local 

levels. 

• New end use markets: Recycling is enabled by profitable end use markets for the 

recycled materials. New end use markets also support new manufacturing jobs and 

increasing the competitiveness of the U.S. economy. Dow is actively working with value 

chain partners to find new end use markets for recycled plastics, and we welcome 

support from Congress on additional opportunities to achieve this objective. 

Conclusions 

Thank you for the opportunity to testify on this important topic. Products made from plastic 

enable much of our modern society, including food packaging used to keep food safer for 

longer, lightweight packaging that reduces fuel usage- and associated emissions - in the 

transportation of several materials, and important medical applications that protect medications 

and supplies from contamination. However, too many plastics are ending up in the environment 

or are being lost to landfills. Dow believes plastics are too valuable to be lost in such ways, and 

we are committed to working with governments, NGOs, communities, and value chain partners 

to advance the plastic circular economy. 

We believe chemical recycling is critical to increasing recycling rates and sustainable material 

management in a circular economy. Chemical recycling does not face the same challenges as 
78 

traditional mechanical recycling, including contamination, compliance and performance. 

However, chemical recycling presents a new series of challenges that must be overcome, 

including scale and cost. We need a comprehensive understanding of the lifecycle impacts to 

ensure we are implementing the principals of a circular economy in a sustainable way. 

Chemical recycling can have a significant impact in addressing global plastic waste and needs 

to be developed in concert with mechanical recycling to deliver a holistic set of solutions for 

society. 

We look forward to working with members of the subcommittee and all interested stakeholders 

on these important issues. 

rM Trademark of The Dow Chemical Company ("Dow") or an affiliated company of Dow 

® Hefty and EnergyBag are trademarks of Reynolds Consumer Products LLC 
79 
80 

Chairwoman STEVENS. Thank you so much. 

At this point we are going to begin our first round of questions, 

and the Chair is going to recognize herself for 5 minutes. 

Undoubtedly, where we see challenge and identify challenge as 

a Nation, we readily want to turn that challenge into opportunity, 

and that is something that I heard from all of you in your scope 

of work and in your testimony. 

Mr. Sincock, I’d like to just drill down for a minute with you. 

Since these new changes from China have been implemented, could 

you just explain a little bit about what our small town of Plymouth, 

the city of Plymouth, has been experiencing with its recycling? 

Mr. SINCOCK. Certainly, the city of Plymouth, we have been— 

we’re right toward the end of our contract with our solid waste and 

recycling hauler, so we’ve been OK at this point, but several of our 

neighboring communities, you know, we all talk, and are feeling 

the pinch and, you know, we have also had our contractor come to 

us and say, look, recycling costs are going up. We need more help. 

We need you to take a look at, you know, perhaps amending our 

contract, those kinds of issues. 

So we’re seeing that there’s more issues with the recycling, especially plastics, in trying to make sure that our residents are able 

to still have a program that is viable from a—you know, an operational standpoint, you know, that’s not cost-prohibitive. And that’s 

really where the—tends to be the trend is going at this point, is 

significant cost increases from our haulers and recyclers related to 

the product, and that obviously passes down to our residents. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. And as you have spent time educating the 

public on the benefits of recycling or encouraging them to recycle, 

what challenges have you run into? What things have you seen 

that worked best in terms of recycling campaigns? And have you 

started to hear about this fear of cost? 

Mr. SINCOCK. Well, certainly one of the things—the big challenges that we have is do we back our recycling programs down? 

You know, we’ve spent so much time and effort building up the recycling programs, you know, our community has very high and impressive rates of recycling in Wayne County, but it also becomes an 

issue for our residents if we are going to back down from the really 

good programs that we currently have and the amount of education 

that we put into it. And it’s a hard sell at the municipal level 

that—I call it the reach-out-and-touch-me level of government 

where, what do you mean, we’re not recycling whatever the product 

may be? That’s a hard, difficult conversation to have with our residents. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. Do you see a revenue opportunity for the 

city in recycling or, you know, continuing to build out your programs? And are there ways that the Federal Government can help 

you to meet those goals? 

Mr. SINCOCK. Well, I think what the issue is on the revenue side 

is—and it depends on the municipality. Our particular contract, we 

wanted to stay out of the swings in the market, so in our particular 

case the vendor takes all of the risk as to market upside and market downside, so we’re not affected. Our price stays constant. Now, 

we don’t get the benefit of, you know, when recycling, you know, 

markets go up and the contractor gets to receive some benefits 
81 

there, but on the flipside of that, we don’t have to deal with the 

downside. 

And so that’s—you know, other municipalities get—they split the 

value of the recycles between the vendor and the community. The 

community will get a small percentage of the recyclables. But as 

the market goes down, that percentage goes down to near zero or 

less than zero. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. We have our storied traditions and best 

practices in Michigan with our recycling programs and our buyback 

programs. I think it’s evident that there are certainly opportunities 

and revenue opportunities, as well as sincere environmental considerations for us to meet, and yet the onus is on our consumers and 

it’s on our taxpayers, and it’s sort of reliant on the altruism of our 

residents to recycle and to not throw—I commend all of you who 

talked about the greasy pizza box in your testimony because—at 

least two of you did. But in terms of how we’re stymied or how we 

can meet some of our bigger goals and some economic opportunities. You know, I commend our last two witnesses for mentioning 

the circular economy and what that means for us and how in sync 

we really are. 

I’m out of time, so I’m just going to conclude with one of the results that we want to take from this hearing is identifying Federal 

opportunity to partner with you in your respective fields and portfolios of work to lead to increased recycling, meeting environmental 

goals, as well as economic opportunity based on technological advancement. 

And, with that, I’m going to recognize my colleague, Mr. Baird, 

for 5 minutes. 

Mr. BAIRD. Thank you, Madam Chair. 

Mr. Boven, the Subaru plant in Lafayette, Indiana, which is in 

my district, has been a zero-landfill facility since 2004, and that reflects a commitment by the company to have as little environmental impact as possible. Can you elaborate for me what Dow and 

the plastics industry in general has been doing to work with the 

front-end sustainability idea and not just the back-end sustainability in producing products? 

Mr. BOVEN. Yes, sure, thank you, Congressman. So at Dow I can 

speak specifically. We’ve had a series of 10-year sustainability 

goals. Now, we’re in our third generation of those. They go out 

through 2025. And the sustainability goals that we have at our 

company are really around defining blueprints for designing sustainability into the future. So when you talk about plastic circularity in particular, the big initiative that we’re very involved with 

is designed for recyclability. How do we help our customers, how 

do we help the marketplace design products that can be recycled 

in the end? 

Today, a lot of packaging, as an example, has gone to very complex structures, which create problems for the recycling industry. 

And so what we’re working with them on is all polyethylene-type 

structures, as an example. And the reason we’re doing that is because polyethylene is one of the largest-collected plastics today, so 

if we can get more materials into common materials that can be 

collected, that can help with increasing plastic recovery and plastic 

recycling. 
82 

This is one example. We have a lot of initiatives of materials 

science in terms of increasing resins that can incorporate recycled 

content, as well as end market. We’re working on new market applications so we can create new large-volume applications to create 

these markets that people say don’t exist. This is where we’re 

spending a lot of our time. 

Mr. BAIRD. Thank you. And continuing on in that same vein, in 

your testimony you discussed the benefits of chemical recycling. 

What’s needed to scale up and bring down the cost of chemical recycling and make it more viable in the United States? Anything? 

Mr. BOVEN. That’s a very good question. One of the things that 

we’re looking at aggressively is, how do we address that very topic 

of scale? When you look at the petrochemical industry today, it’s 

been capitalized around very large fossil fuel deposits. When you 

talk about using plastic as a feedstock, plastic is everywhere. So a 

significant challenge that we are working through and trying to address with value chain partners is how do we aggregate plastic and 

bring it to a central location so we can get the appropriate amount 

of feedstock to build the appropriate scale we need to be meaningfully effective? 

At the same time, we’re working on the capital intensity equation to try to bring down the capital intensity per metric ton of 

product produced so we can put feedstock recycling located where 

the feedstock is, in this case, waste plastic. 

Mr. BAIRD. Thank you. Another question—have I got time I 

think? Dow and the other companies are investing heavily in new 

sustainable material and in recycling technologies. What’s the market incentive for industry to invest in research in that area? 

Mr. BOVEN. Well, quite frankly, society is demanding it. The 

plastic waste issue, you can’t turn on the television, you can’t go 

to the internet without seeing it. And society wants solutions to 

this. So we look at this as, yes, it’s a big challenge, but it can be 

an opportunity for those who want to make those investments 

today and work toward addressing the problem of the future. So 

this is how we see it. It’s going to be absolute, and it’s where we’re 

putting a lot of time and effort. 

Mr. BAIRD. Thank you. And one last question if you will. 

Mr. BOVEN. Sure. 

Mr. BAIRD. How would developing standards for plastic materials 

and recycling help advance the industry in the United States and 

maintain America’s leadership in that field? 

Mr. BOVEN. Standards in what regard? 

Mr. BAIRD. I was thinking about any of the things that relate to 

regulation of plastics or the quality of the plastics. 

Mr. BOVEN. Thank you. So one thing that will help certainly is 

to create definitions around what recycling is. Today, when we look 

at what people want and require, it’s high-end recycled material. 

That’s not going to be possible without advanced recycling technologies. Today, there is no universal definition of recycling. And 

as we look to bring forward new technologies, we want to make 

sure that technologies like pyrolysis, gasification, solvolysis, those 

types of processes are included in the definition of recycling. And 

this would be increasingly important as people look to put policy 

around. We know there are States that are having these discus-
83 

sions, and if they start putting policy around recycling targets, definitions will follow. And we want to ensure that there’s broad definitions that don’t preclude technology. 

Mr. BAIRD. Thank you very much. And I yield back my time. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. The Chair now recognizes Mr. McAdams 

for 5 minutes. 

Mr. MCADAMS. Thank you, Madam Chair, for convening this 

timely and important hearing. 

And thank you, Mr. Sincock, Dr. Menon, Dr. Beckham, and Mr. 

Boven, for your testimony here today. 

In my previous role, I was the Mayor of Salt Lake County, and 

I worked to enhance our waste management practices to achieve 

our environmental goals, and it often aligned with our fiscal objectives. We found that they were oftentimes the same thing. Whether 

collecting green waste to break down and resell or capturing methane leakage for energy generation or landfill, technologies made 

our waste management greener, smarter, and less costly to taxpayers. 

So I’m excited today to have the opportunity to discuss how we 

can make use of new and forthcoming technologies to make our 

plastics sorting, management, and recycling more effective and 

profitable in recycle and upcycle applications. We’ve also seen some 

of the challenges as global interests in some—in some of our recycling has waned, and so—my first question is for you, Mr. Sincock. 

As boots on the ground in your town, what’s been the most effective tool that you’ve used to help residents to improve their recycling practices, the individual practices? 

Mr. SINCOCK. Education, and it’s ongoing and multifaceted. So 

it’s mailers to the home, it’s stickers on the trash carts, it’s social 

media. All of those things are a critical element to ensuring that 

the plastics industry has a quality product to deal with. 

Mr. MCADAMS. And what’s the most common request or complaint that your community voices about your recycling program or 

what have you done to remedy any concerns that were raised? 

Mr. SINCOCK. The most common complaint is that we don’t recycle enough—— 

Mr. MCADAMS. Yes. 

Mr. SINCOCK [continuing]. And that—you know, it becomes a 

challenge as to how do we have a product that somebody else is 

going to use. 

Mr. MCADAMS. So, Dr. Beckham, in your testimony you said that 

recycling alone can save 40 to 90 percent of the inherent energy in 

plastics relative to the production of new plastics. Does this apply 

to both chemical and mechanical recycling? 

Dr. BECKHAM. Most of those statistics were currently obtained in 

the context of standard today’s mechanical recycling. 

Mr. MCADAMS. Do we have good estimates for potential energy 

savings using chemical recycling? 

Dr. BECKHAM. Right. I think judicious lifecycle assessments, 

techno-economic analysis, as well as, just generally supply chain 

energy analyses are forthcoming, but we have looked at PET 

upcycling, for example, using chemistry to produce two composite 

materials, and they have shown over standard composites manufac-
84 

turing can save up to 60 percent of the supply chain energy and 

reduce greenhouse gas emissions quite considerably as well. 

Mr. MCADAMS. It’s promising. Dr. Menon, what technologies 

could help us—could help simply—to simple—simplify decisionmaking for Americans as they sort their waste into trash or bin recycling every day? And maybe that’s generally as a question, but 

I’ve also—there have been some experimental technologies that I’ve 

heard about or haven’t had the opportunity to actually witness 

them but—about single streaming both waste and recycling, and 

your thoughts on that. 

Dr. MENON. In terms of technology, the real issue is access to 

technology. It’s one thing for academia to have instrumentation. 

It’s another thing entirely for recycling facilities to have instrumentation. So perhaps one of the things that we should look into particularly from the point of view of academia is to make technology 

affordable. Can we reinvent instrumentation that is more affordable and more accessible? Recycling companies make pennies to a 

pound, so every dollar, every pound of recycling material matters. 

So they’re not able to invest necessarily into technology, so maybe 

a new generation of affordable technologies is what we’re thinking 

of at this point rather than reinventing technology as well. But, as 

was mentioned by Dr. Beckham, of course chemical recycling is— 

it’s virgin territory in terms of large-scale recycling, so that is 

something we would be considering as well. 

Mr. MCADAMS. So I guess my question to all of you, and I’m 

about out of time, but what infrastructure are we lacking as a 

country? What—and what can we do to—as a Congress to further 

incentivize these investments in R&D and then deployment of technology? 

Mr. SINCOCK. Well, I think the issue for us at the local municipal 

level is where’s the end product, and is there a use, and then how 

do we cost-effectively collect that material? And, you know, mixing 

it into a single stream is interesting. 

Mr. MCADAMS. I’ve seen the technology. As a Mayor, it was troubling to me because I was—the technology is there. My concern 

was is it viable and in experimenting with that, do we lose all the 

ground we’ve gained with educating our consumers on sorting 

going single stream, then have it fail and we just lost. 

Mr. SINCOCK. Exactly. 

Mr. MCADAMS. Yes. Thank you. I yield back. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Balderson 

for 5 minutes. 

Mr. BALDERSON. Thank you, Chairwoman. 

Thank you all for being here this afternoon. 

This question goes to Dr. Menon and Mr. Boven. I had a question 

for all of you, but the gentlemen down there took my question, so, 

currently, municipalities set their own recycling standards depending upon what the facility in the area is capable of processing. They 

can vary widely from city to city depending upon the local infrastructure. 

Dr. Menon, you’ve touched on NIST’s efforts to create processing 

standards in this space. Recently, the university, as you stated, received a grant to work on expanding this. While I understand the 

draw toward this, I remain concerned that the Federal Government 
85 

is not best suited to achieve this goal. Ensuring that recycling 

plants across the country have the same processing abilities, however, would lessen the amount of plastic that needs to be exported 

for processing. Could you speak about what you have found in your 

research on this subject? 

Dr. MENON. Thank you very much for the question. I do believe 

NIST is the right agency. In particular, we don’t have a universal 

standard when it comes to recycling plastics. If you look at the 

resin identification code, the numbers 1 through 7, it tells you the 

polymer content in a bottle. It doesn’t tell you anything about the 

contaminants, nor does it tell you how to recycle the product. So 

setting these standards is a gamechanger when it comes to recycling, and setting standards is what NIST does. Thank you. 

Mr. BALDERSON. Thank you. Mr. Boven, are the suggestions that 

Dr. Menon offered something that Dow could see working in the 

marketplace? 

Mr. BOVEN. Yes, thank you for the question. Yes, the answer is 

yes. In fact, there’s—this is—the Sustainable Packaging Coalition 

where that group has already developed and working toward developing recycling standards for packagers to put on their labels, both 

paper and plastic, the how-to recycle label. And it gives implicit instructions to consumers on the packages they buy on how to recycle 

it, whether it be not recyclable or store drop-off. Those types of instructions are put on it. That’s a first step, and that is working at 

cleaning up the recycling streams today because one of the issues 

is you have wish cyclers who put everything in their single-bin collection system, which actually creates a lot of problems for the 

MRFs and you have a lot of rejected material because of that, so 

it starts with cleaning up what goes into the recycling bins first. 

Mr. BALDERSON. OK. Thank you very much. I yield back my remaining time, Madam Chair. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. Yes. The Chair would now like to recognize Mr. Foster for 5 minutes. 

Mr. FOSTER. Well, thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to 

our witnesses. 

Let’s see. Most of the talk so far has been on thermoplastics, PET 

and polyethylene. Are thermosets and cross-linked plastics pretty 

much a lost cause for recycling or are there enzymatic systems that 

may depolymerize them and allow them to be recycled? 

Dr. BECKHAM. So I’ll take that. So thermosets today are indeed 

very challenging to recycle because it’s hard to get them to flow in 

the context of the mechanical and thermal recycling paradigms we 

have now. Thinking forward to recyclability by design, there is an 

emerging field in polymer science around this concept of vitrimers 

where you have cross-links that are able to be chemically broken 

down, so you would imagine taking a thermoset, a composite material, dumping it in, for example, to acid, and breaking that down 

into flowable polymers again. There’s an enormous opportunity 

here for recycling. 

A wind turbine blade, which is a cross-linked thermoset, which 

we can’t do right now, we grind it up and put most of it into the 

landfill or burn it. But I think emerging chemistries for 

recyclability by design for composite materials that would go into 
86 

a wind turbine or car or snowboard or whatever have enormous potential, so—— 

Mr. FOSTER. And do structural fibers that are, you know, carbon 

fibers or other fibers put in, do those make life really rough for recycling as well? 

Dr. BECKHAM. Certainly, traditional polyacrylonitrile carbon fiber 

today is very challenging from a recyclability perspective. Again 

mostly, it’s thermal energy recovery is sort of the place that’s routed to. There are emerging chemistries from the academic community and generally the U.S. research community on ways to break 

down polyacrylonitrile-based carbon fiber, but that’s incredibly 

challenging. So, again, I think we need to rethink how we’re putting those carbon fibers together and think about recyclability by 

design, as well as lifetime performance—— 

Mr. FOSTER. And so by the thermal—you mean that is pyrolysis 

and gasification, what you’re saying—— 

Dr. BECKHAM. As well as just simply burning it for energy recovery in some cases. 

Mr. FOSTER. OK. And actually, Mr. Boven, you mentioned in addition to pyrolysis and gasification something that sounded like solvolysis or something. What was—that’s not something I’m familiar 

with. 

Mr. BOVEN. Yes, solvolysis. So solvolysis is a solvent-based process. It’s commonly used for PET and nylon. Those polymer architectures are well-suited for that where you can use a solvent to break 

it down into monomer and then you can build it back up. 

Mr. FOSTER. OK. All right. So it’s a solvent. Got it. I understand. 

I think I used to do that with Styrofoam and model airplane glue 

as a child. Now, see, look at that, there’s a lot of common experience in that, the first time you tried to do that and it didn’t end 

well. 

So what fraction then of the current plastic production stream 

are easy targets like PET and high-density polyethylene? Is that 80 

percent of the plastics production that are things we ought to be 

able to recycle or are there just a million small streams that will 

all each have to be dealt with? 

Mr. BOVEN. Well, polyolefins are—polyolefins being generically 

polypropylene, polyethylene, are the largest polymer family used in 

packaging-type applications, non-durable applications, applications 

that have a life that’s less than, say, a year. And those are the targeted—where we should put a lot of effort in recycling and recovery, and they have large end markets as well. So if you can recover 

those materials, you have the opportunity to recycle those and find 

homes for them. 

Mr. FOSTER. But is that 50 percent of plastic production or just 

another 20-percent hunk? 

Mr. BOVEN. No, it—I’d have to get back with you, sir, on that 

exact question, but those two polymer families are the largest. It’s 

directionally just south of 50 percent are polyethylene-type materials. 

Mr. FOSTER. OK. And, now, according to Wikipedia, if you look 

at polyethylene terephthalate, a majority goes into fibers. And so 

is it—how do recycle fibers if someone makes, you know, a Dacron 

shirt or something like this? Are you really going to recycle that? 
87 

The number in Wikipedia was about 50 percent going into fibers, 

and is that a whole separate struggle to even collect it in a pure 

stream? 

Mr. BOVEN. The challenge there is collection of textiles, yes. You 

have to collect it, and then you would have to put it in some sort 

of chemical recycling process to effectively recycle it. 

Mr. FOSTER. Right. And these are often mixed with cotton and 

so on, and so it’s a difficult—are there any plausible ways to make 

that happen, to recycle clothes that are made with multiple fibers? 

Mr. BOVEN. So chemical recycling, feedstock recycling has the opportunity, depending on the technology route that you take. Gasification, as an example, is a technology route that can take any organic material, so it can be biomass, it can be fiber, it can be plastic. You can put it in there. That will break it down to fundamental 

syngas, and from syngas, we can do lots of different things with it. 

Dr. BECKHAM. If I can just add one thing in terms of PET mixed 

with cotton, which is a lot of polyester clothing, enzymatic processes are exquisitely selective to go in and break both the Ester 

bonds in PET, as well as the ether bonds in cellulose or cotton to 

make sugars and mixtures of these building blocks of PET. So I 

think there’s a lot of potential there as well. 

Mr. FOSTER. OK. Thank you, and I yield back. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Gonzalez 

for 5 minutes. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, witnesses, 

for being here today. 

I first want to use this time to recognize the University of Akron’s College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering, which 

is recognized as being one of the world’s best in the polymer 

sciences. The University also does great work getting young students excited about the polymer sciences through their Akron Global Polymer Academy, which provides opportunities for teachers and 

students of all ages to experience the world of polymers by organizing in-school visits and field trips to the university’s research facilities. They’re doing a fantastic job. Polymer research and development has been huge in northeast Ohio, where I’m from, for my 

entire life and before it, so we’re proud of that. 

I want to take my time to really just understand this a little bit 

better frankly. And my first question will be to Mr. Boven. I’ll probably stay with you if that’s OK. I first want to understand the 

interplay between mechanical and chemical in the context of the 

circular economy. It strikes me, as I read your testimony, that 

chemical is probably how we get there ultimately. I’m sure there’s 

obviously a role for mechanical, but can you just kind of walk me 

through that for a second? 

Mr. BOVEN. Yes, sure, thank you for the question. So when you 

look at the—there is a relationship between mechanical and chemical recycling in the sense that we would suggest that, if it can be 

mechanically recycled, it should be. It should be because there’s a 

lower carbon footprint. It’s not as energy-intensive, and it can be 

deployed locally, right? You can do mechanical recycling at a very 

local level very effectively. The challenge with mechanical recycling 

has always been finding end markets—— 

Mr. GONZALEZ. Right. 
88 

Mr. BOVEN [continuing]. Because you’ll have some polymer degradation. Products that cannot be introduced into mechanical recycling system effectively are the products that should go into chemical recycling because at that route you can address the contamination issues that come. And in fact, when you talk about MRFs 

today, on average, about 25 to 30 percent of the material going into 

a MRF is actually rejected because it’s too—— 

Mr. GONZALEZ. OK. 

Mr. BOVEN [continuing]. Highly contaminated to be processed. 

You can feed that into a chemical recycling process to then recycle 

the product. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. Thank you. And then my second question, when 

it comes to chemical recycling, and I’ll score these 1, 5, and 10, so 

if 1 is sort of we understand what needs to happen but we haven’t 

really started developing, 5 is our tech is viable but we need to find 

business models to get it deployed more in the market, and then 

10 is we understand the tech, we understand the business model, 

we just need to deploy and scale, where are we on chemical manufacturing? 

Mr. BOVEN. I would put us at a 5—— 

Mr. GONZALEZ. OK. 

Mr. BOVEN [continuing]. Quite frankly. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. OK. 

Mr. BOVEN. When we’re talking about chemical manufacturing, 

we’re talking about mature technologies like gasification, pyrolysis. 

They’ve been around for a long time. They have not been used 

widely for the purpose of recycling plastic, and so we’re talking 

about putting a value chain together and different partners together to aggregate the plastic to get it to a chemical recycling facility. From there, you turn it into an intermediate, and then you 

have to integrate it into the current petrochemical industry. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. OK. 

Mr. BOVEN. So we have to work on the business model side. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. OK. So it’s a combination of business model. Once 

we get there, then we can scale it. 

My last one—and I kind of hate to go here, but these paper 

straws, they are my pet peeve. I took my son the other day to get 

a milkshake. He’s 1-year-old. We do this on Saturdays, paper straw 

shows up, the thing disintegrates before we’re a third of the way 

through. He’s also throwing whipped cream at my face, so, you 

know, all kinds of things going on there. 

I personally despise them. On top of that, only .025 percent of 

plastic that’s flowing into the ocean is straws, plastic straws. They 

also require more energy to manufacture than plastics. So I kind 

of want to just have you give me some hope that maybe Dow is 

working on either new technologies, new bioplastics that are more 

efficient and better for the environment or that we’re making 

progress on the sort-ability because my understanding is the reason why it’s hard to recycle plastic straws is because it’s hard to 

sort them. So give me some hope, please. 

Mr. BOVEN. Yes, we should take hope. There is hope, and I say 

that because plastic pollution is now widely accepted across the 

world. And you see collaboration happening across the value chain 

that hasn’t happened at least in my 22 years in the plastic indus-
89 

try. You see industry partners coming together making investments like the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, where over $1 billion 

has been committed to fund solutions to drive the ending of plastic 

waste. Now, is $1 billion enough? I know $1 billion is a great start, 

and we expect it to continue to grow. 

When you talk about biodegradability or bio-based plastics, those 

are two very different things. We think the focus needs to be on 

investing in infrastructure to recover the plastic and retain its 

value. That’s where we’re spending a majority of our time, and we 

don’t want to get distracted with other things that aren’t going to 

have a meaningful impact. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. OK. Thank you. And I yield back. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. It looks like we’ll be calling the T&I Committee after this hearing based on those repeated claims. 

The Chair is now going to recognize Mr. Cohen for 5 minutes. 

Mr. COHEN. Thank you. Good news for your son, a gift you can 

get him and I would get him if—and should get him and present 

to you, you can buy steel straws, and he’ll have his own straw to 

get his milkshake out of, and it’ll be real cold when it comes up, 

which is a nice feeling. Plastic does not give you that nice feeling, 

but a cold steel straw is a very attractive thing. On the internet 

you can get them—a set of 20 for $9.99, wholesale, Amazon.com. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. Mr. Cohen, his birthday was 2 weeks ago. 

Mr. COHEN. Oh, wow. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. We accept. We accept. 

Mr. COHEN. Would he still accept gifts? 

Mr. GONZALEZ. Oh, absolutely. 

Mr. COHEN. Good. Well, I will get him one. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. Thank you. 

Mr. COHEN. A set. I’ve got a friend in Los Angeles who’s big in 

the Anti-Plastics Coalition, Dianna Cohen, no relation, and she’s 

given me steel straws. And I don’t use straws that much, but when 

I do, I find a great sense of tactile, you know, pleasure out of using 

that steel straw, which I never got out of a plastic straw or certainly not a paper straw. So this is a whole new day for everybody 

really. 

Now, I would like to ask Mr.—is it Boven? Last year, I had a bill 

which passed the House that said we would not use plastic straws 

in the cafeterias, and it passed, but it passed over the objections 

of Dow Chemical I think. There was a Congressman from—that 

worked for Dow, represented Dow, et cetera, got a lot of money 

from Dow, and he worked against it and got—wanted to get—water 

it down. Why can’t Dow come up with something that is good for 

the environment rather than things that are bad for the environment and work against us making the environment better? 

Mr. BOVEN. Congressman, thank you for your question. 

Mr. COHEN. I’m sure thank you is not what you really meant, but 

thank you for saying that. 

Mr. BOVEN. I’m not an expert in the policy side or familiar with 

the discussion that you’re talking about, but we can have our D.C. 

office get back to and address that question. 

Mr. COHEN. Well, that’d be all right I guess, but, you know, we— 

I think we’re changing our policies, and we ought to be—like right 

now, there’s a whole bunch of plastic bottles with water out there. 
90 

We really shouldn’t be using plastic bottles with water, and I 

brought it in and all of a sudden I thought, what are we doing? I 

mean, we’ve got these cups here, this is great, but we ought to be 

carrying around our own and pouring water into them from the 

sink. Potomac water is fine. 

Mr. SHERMAN. I second that motion. 

Mr. COHEN. And—exactly. Good work, Brad. And not using plastic as much as we can. It’s reduce, recycle, and reuse. Well, reduce, 

and that’s what you—we’ve got to do because it is getting in the 

water and animals are dying. The—you know, they found whales 

with tons of plastic in their gut, and they think it related to their 

deaths. And there’s all kind of sea life that is being killed because 

of plastic pollutions in the oceans. So we need to stop using plastic 

as much as we can. 

Dr. Menon, do you have any ideas on how we can maybe create 

or use paper, something else, anything other than plastic? And I 

know this is made of plastic, but this is reused. 

Dr. MENON. Mr. Cohen, thank you very much for the question. 

I do not often know of a material that would replace plastic so easily. It exists because of the availability, the ease, and the 

versatility. So it is not easily replaced. But maybe there are plant 

fiber solutions that we could think of that would be easier to at 

least degrade easily. 

But I would like to make a comment regarding one of the statements you made. So in the Mariana Trench, which is deeper than 

Everest is tall, every animal species found had plastic in their guts, 

so this is where we are when it comes to plastics recycling. And 

plastics recycling in the ocean, that’s an entirely—I mean, so that’s 

an impossible task. It shouldn’t get there in the first place. 

Mr. COHEN. Yes, well, we need to find a way to reuse or reduce 

our use of plastics and then reuse whatever possible. And recycling 

is great and I recycle everything I can, and I hope Memphis does 

a good job on it, but, you know, it’s just a different—today, I 

went—and I’m very proud of what I did today because I’ve been 

obsessing on it. These glasses, eyeglasses, I like them a lot, and 

I’ve had them for long time. And I got them to replace a pair of 

sunglasses I had that I really loved. They were American Optical 

Saratogas, which were the same glasses that John Kennedy wore, 

sunglasses. And so John Kennedy wore them, I wore them. You 

know, he was in the House, I’m in the House. That’s as far as it 

goes. 

And my sunglasses—I broke them about 15 years ago I think, 

and then I broke these about 3 weeks or a month ago. Everybody 

in the world tells you, you can’t repair plastic, it’s impossible, it’s 

done. Well, I’d saved those glasses from 15 years ago, and these, 

and I took them to a guy up here at 750 17th, and he fixed both 

pair of glasses. You can’t see the—that they were broken, and these 

were broken in two different places, $70, they’re back together. 

Reuse your plastic frames. Don’t buy new ones. Get them redone, 

750 17th Avenue, right opposite the Executive Office Building, 

great deal. 

And with that, I want to say I love The Graduate, but plastics, 

no. 
91 

Chairwoman STEVENS. All right. The Chair is now going to recognize Mr. Sherman for 5 minutes. 

Mr. SHERMAN. Thank you, and thank you for holding these hearings and bringing them to my particular attention. 

The gentleman from Tennessee focuses us not only on reduce, 

reuse, and recycle, but also repair, so the fourth R, but once you 

get through all four R’s, there’s a reason why we prefer, from an 

environmental standpoint, paper straws to plastic straws, and that 

is that paper is biodegradable. How close are we to developing plastic products that have the advantages of plastic, pretty much the 

cost of plastic, but are in fact biodegradable? Mr. Boven? You guys 

anywhere close to that? 

Mr. BOVEN. Biodegradable—biodegradable plastics do exist 

today. PLAs (polylactic acid or polylactides) are an example. Biodegradable plastics present serious challenges to today’s recycling 

infrastructure. They are not accepted into the infrastructure—— 

Mr. SHERMAN. But they will—you know, a paper straw can’t be 

recycled or I guess is often not recycled, but at least it biodegrades. 

How biodegradable? How long do you put it in the ground before 

it disappears? 

Mr. BOVEN. Well, Dow isn’t producing those resins, but there are 

biodegradable plastics available. Again, from our perspective, when 

you look at biodegradability, biodegradability is not going to solve 

the plastic pollution issue that we have. We want to focus—we 

don’t want to distract from—— 

Mr. SHERMAN. Well, why is that? Right now, we’re recycling 9 

percent, so it’s 91 percent irrelevant whether it’s a recyclable or 

nonrecyclable plastic; it’s not going to be recycled. What is—what 

tax incentives or whatever could we give for biodegradable plastics? 

Does anybody have any proposal? Let me move on. We’ve got these 

islands of plastic in the—floating in the ocean, mostly plastic. 

There—is there any commercial value to that which you’ve subsidized could be used to be chemically recycled? Does anybody have 

an answer? None of our—yes? 

Dr. MENON. So harvesting the plastic from the ocean would be 

the problem. 

Mr. SHERMAN. Right, that’s what I’m—— 

Dr. MENON. So—— 

Mr. SHERMAN. I mean, it’s floating there—— 

Dr. MENON. Right. So these plastics are—— 

Mr. SHERMAN. But someone picking it up wouldn’t be that—if we 

picked it up, what would—would we do anything useful with it? 

Dr. MENON. Yes, I think most of them are PET in there. 

Dr. BECKHAM. Yes, I mean, certainly, if you are able—if you are 

able to harvest it in an economically viable manner, it would probably be like the same plastics we get at materials recovery facilities 

already. 

Mr. SHERMAN. OK. So these pose a major threat to the environment and the oceans, with the proper incentives, somebody would 

pick them up, get some subsidy, and use those chemicals for something useful? 

Dr. BECKHAM. Potentially, but I think that the engineering challenges of going and harvesting plastics from the ocean are incred-
92 

ible and would certainly need a lot of investment to be able to do 

that at a scale that would actually make a difference. 

Mr. SHERMAN. OK. We have 8.3 billion metric tons of plastics 

produced globally, 6.3 billion becomes plastic waste, 9 percent is 

being recycled. The U.S. only recycles 9 percent, China does 25, Europe does 30, so our 9 looks pretty weak. And then you realize 

some of our 9 is really in Chinese landfills. What can the U.S. do 

to promote recycling internationally? Does anybody have an answer? Do you want to comment? I’m looking at four witnesses, all 

of whom are extremely shy. 

Dr. BECKHAM. I mean, I would say that—— 

Mr. SHERMAN. Yes. 

Dr. BECKHAM [continuing]. Again, I think the United States has 

the opportunity to lead the way from a technology development 

perspective to create chemical recycling technologies that will 

incentivize the reclamation of waste plastics. If we can do that in 

the United States, likely those technologies would be deployable 

outside the United States as well if they—if the economic incentive 

is there. 

Mr. SHERMAN. Is there any particular technology that you think 

the U.S. Government should be—you know, it’s just on the cusp of 

doing something important but needs some research dollars or incentives. Is there any one area of research any of you would recommend? Yes, Mr. Boven? 

Mr. BOVEN. Yes, so research in creating new end applications 

would be very valuable. One of the problems that’s been articulated 

is that there’s not enough end markets for recycling, and so accelerating end market generation would create a home for recycled 

plastic. 

Mr. SHERMAN. My time is expired. Thank you. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. The Chair would like to reclaim 5 additional minutes for questions. This is what all of the Committee 

looks like, by the way, on the Subcommittee for Research and Technology. 

I wanted to kind of glom onto something, Dr. Beckham, that you 

had included in your written testimony where you wrote, ‘‘Given 

the amount of plastics in the food chain, plastics are commonly now 

found in the human body with potential toxicological effects that 

are not yet fully understood.’’ And that sentence jumped out at me 

in a very stark way in part because I view all of you as the solution 

delivery vehicles of what we want to do on plastic recycling. You’re 

on the solution end, you’re on the problem-solving end. 

You know, we’ve heard a few comments. It’s been couched within 

your testimony about some of the illegal dumping that’s going on, 

some of the mismanagement, the missed opportunities to reuse, reduce, and recycle. But I was just wondering if you could kind of 

help me understand how we could understand these toxicological 

effects given that you are testifying before a House panel today. 

Dr. BECKHAM. I will note that I’m not a toxicologist, but with 

that caveat, I think certainly there are—there is a large research 

community that does toxicology and thinking about—there was— 

for example, there was a paper published a couple weeks ago where 

they measured micro and sort of nano plastics in the air and found 

even in pristine environments that you can breathe this stuff in. 
93 

How that affects the human body, how that affects animal life in 

general I think is still very poorly understood. And from my perspective I think that Federal research dollars could be put into the 

toxicology community to understand those types of things because 

we don’t know. We simply don’t know what the effects of those will 

be. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. We find ourselves with a plastic paradox. 

OK. I wanted to capture that for the record. 

And at this time I would like to excuse my distinguished colleague, Ranking Member Jim Baird, who has an appointment to 

make. Obviously, this has been a robust hearing, and we’ve heard 

many rounds. I’m going to yield back the remainder of my time. 

That concludes—oh, Mr. Sherman has another one? Do you want 

to go again, Brad? 

Mr. SHERMAN. I was just going to ask one. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. You can go again. Go ahead. I’m going to 

cede 5 more minutes to my distinguished colleague, Mr. Brad Sherman, who I am so glad joined us today, by the way. This is the full 

Research and Tech Subcommittee in action. Thank you. Go ahead, 

Brad. 

Mr. SHERMAN. It’s been over 40 years since the last Federal law 

to promote national research and development program for improving methods of collection and recycling of solid waste. The law was 

a national effort to recover valuable petroleum-based resources that 

were filling our landfills. It sounds like a lot of what we’re facing 

today except that the purport volumes are exponentially larger, 

and the types of plastics are different. We need to find the right 

balance between the Federal Government having a mandate and 

States and localities doing it their own way. What do you gentlemen feel is the Federal role here both in research and in mandating procedures at the State and local level? I’ll go straight down, 

Mr. Sincock. 

Mr. SINCOCK. Well, I think you bring out a very valid point. Just 

in looking at our own statistics for the city of Plymouth, we’ve seen 

our materials that we’ve landfilled from 1992 go up from 1,648 tons 

to—in 2018 to 2,400 tons, but our recycling has also gone up a little 

bit during that period of time. So I think government—if the government is going to be involved in things, there has to be a national standard of what’s acceptable. And I think from that—and 

industry can move forward from there at least on the collection 

standpoint. 

I agree with you on your plastic bottle there that you bring with 

you. In our case we’ve got about 30 employees in our city hall. One 

of our employees had the suggestion that we replace the drinking 

fountain with one where you could fill up your bottle. In just over 

a year, we filled up over 6,000 bottles. 

Dr. MENON. Mr. Sherman, thank you very much for that question. The Earth is our home, and charity begins at home. Not every 

industry is profitable from the get-go. Sometimes governments 

have to intervene and help start industry. This in particular may 

be true when you’re talking about ocean plastics. It may not be 

profitable. There’s no way to foresee how technology changes and 

see how if things will be done differently in the future. But as of 

now, if we have to clean up the oceans, we have to pay the price. 
94 

It is where we live. So the burden falls on us, on all of us to help 

industry in cleaning up the planet. Thank you. 

Dr. BECKHAM. So I will echo those sentiments very strongly. I 

think that one of the roles of the Federal Government is to support 

research that will allow for revolutionary changes and step changes 

in the way that we deal with today’s plastics, as well as redesign 

for tomorrow’s plastics. And that kind of fundamental research I 

think will be really critical for, again, enabling a new industry in 

the United States using chemical recycling. 

Mr. BOVEN. Yes, thank you for the question. I would answer your 

question echoing my comments earlier about definitions. The Federal Government can help with definitions around what recycling 

is. This will be important as, again, advanced recycling technology 

is brought to the forefront. 

Two, I would say recycling certification, meaning that the advanced recycling systems that we’re talking about depolymerizing 

the product, putting it back into the front end of the polymer manufacturing process, we want to be able to certify what was recycled 

and then give those certifications to our customer and so they can 

feel confident that they’re purchasing recycled material, much like, 

say, wind energy as an example. 

And last, I would say the Federal Government can help in piloting programs. There’s a lot of work being done at looking at new, 

again, end-market applications for recycled plastic, and so the government can help with piloting these programs to bring them to 

scale. Dow, as an example, is doing work with using recycled materials in roads and other durable applications like that. 

Mr. SHERMAN. I yield back. 

Chairwoman STEVENS. Before we bring this hearing to a close, 

we obviously want to thank our distinguished witnesses again for 

testifying before us on the Committee today. I think you answered 

the tough questions as best as you could. You gave us some things 

to think about. I believe that we’re going to meet the charge of this 

time. I believe that there is a rallying call. 

I represent a district in Michigan surrounded by freshwater 

lakes. I’m in a State surrounded by freshwater lakes. And as people hear the alarming statistics around the equivalent of a trash 

can or—excuse me, it’s a dispensary of trash being dumped into the 

ocean per minute, that’s alarming, going into the farthest trenches 

of our ocean and seeing that there’s plastic waste there, that’s not 

a result that any of us necessarily want to leave. But that’s why 

I think we call it a plastic paradox because plastic has improved 

our lives. It has made it so that we can have food security and food 

delivered throughout our country and into the mouths of people 

and medical advancements. 

But we’ve got to ask ourselves where and how we are going to 

meet this charge. Does it fully fall on the consumer? I believe there 

are individuals who want to step up and participate in recycling 

programs and find an altruistic value in doing so because they 

should and because they have a municipality that enables them to 

do that. 

We have industry and public-private partnerships. We’ve got certainly great expertise that’s researching this and understanding 

the chemical compounds. But we know we need to do better, and 
95 

so we can turn to our colleagues throughout Federal Government 

and all of an interagency approach to meeting the technological 

considerations. 

I think, Mr. Boven, we’d certainly like to continue to hear from 

you on the work that you are doing on the corporate side, but as 

it matches with what the National Institute of Standards and 

Technology is hopefully going to bring forward. And we will continue to partner with you and support you. I will say $3.2 million 

with Dr. Menon goes a long way. 

The record on this hearing will remain open for 2 weeks for additional statements from Members and for any other additional questions that the Committee may ask of our witnesses. 

At this time, our witnesses are excused, and the hearing is now 

adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 3:46 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.] 

(97) 

Appendix I 

ANSWERS TO POST-HEARING QUESTIONS
98 

ANSWERS TO POST-HEARING QUESTIONS

Responses by Dr. Govind Menon 
99 

Responses by Dr. Gregg Beckham 

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

"Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling" 

Dr. Gregg T. Beckham, Senior Research Fellow, National Bioenergy Center, National 

Renewable Energy Laboratory 

Questions submitted by Chairwoman Haley Stevens 

1. During the hearing there was a discussion about chemical recycling and how far along the 

United States is in the process of researching, developing and scaling a chemical recycling 

process that can be economically viable. How would you respond to the question about 

where we are on technology readiness, on a scale from I to 10? What recommendations do 

you have for what the Federal government can do to help develop chemical recycling 

technologies in the U.S.? 

Answer: In terms of scalable solutions for chemical recycling of all large-volume plastics, 

I think that we are at a 2 (with 10 being ready to scale and commercially viable). 

Today, plastics pyrolysis to produce monomers can be employed for some limited, clean 

plastics streams to produce monomers, but this technology is not widely practiced, and 

economic and life-cycle analyses and extensive product validation will be required to 

determine if this approach is actually viable. Moreover, significant technical challenges 

remain in high-temperature processing of plastics, including in the feeding of solid plastics 

to high-temperature, high-pressure reactors, dealing with heterogeneity in the plastics 

streams, and the impact of contaminants on the ability for recycling and upcycling of the 

resulting products. 

Gasification of plastics to produce synthesis gas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide) is also 

relatively mature from a technology development perspective, but it is typically thought 

that gasification will require huge scales to be economical, which plastics may not be able 

to achieve in an economically viable manner from a collection perspective to a centralized 

facility of sufficient size to be realistic. More analysis here is certainly needed as well. 

Why I believe we are at a 2 is because for more selective and robust chemical recycling 

and upcycling technologies, only a few demonstration plants are being built for specific 

single plastics now (such as polyethylene terephthalate), and it is not yet clear how 

sustainable and economically viable those pioneer strategies will be. Selective chemical 

recycling technologies (that are not pyrolysis or gasification) able to handle mixed plastic 

waste in many cases are still either conceptual or at a research scale, and the ability to 

handle both mixed and contaminated polymer waste streams will be critical for the design 

of a new chemical recycling industry in the U.S. 

Thus, research and development is urgently needed, guided by judicious economic and lifecycle analyses, to develop new approaches, new catalysts, and new processes to break 

down plastics selectively and either recycle them to virgin-like materials or upcycle them 
100 

into higher-value components, and research and development efforts in this space are still 

very much in their infancy. 

Moreover, beyond dedicated, sustained, and long-term funding for chemical plastics 

recycling research, development, and deployment, I strongly recommend that the Federal 

government approve plastic waste as a feedstock for research and development activities 

that can be funded by agencies such as the US Department of Energy. Specifically, offices 

such the BioEnergy Technologies Office in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable 

Energy have invested huge amounts of research funds into the depolymerization and 

fractionation of plant biomass and other organic wet waste, and these learnings and the 

associated expertise from the research community can be directly applied to plastics. 

Changing the classification of plastics waste to be able to be worked on and funded by 

offices like the BioEnergy Technologies Office will accelerate work in this field and more 

effectively bring to bear the science and engineering expertise of the nation to this critical 

problem of plastics upcycling. 
101 

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLGY 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY 

"Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling" 

Questions for the Record to: 

Dr. Gregg Beckham 

Senior Research Fellow 

National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

Submitted by Congressman Daniel Lipinski 

1. Along with my colleague, Mr. Moolenaar, I recently introduced the House companion to 

the Sustainable Chemistry Research and Development Act. This legislation recognizes 

by the importance of sustainable chemistry principles in product design and materials 

transformation. How can sustainable chemistry principles be incorporated into the 

recycling process? 

Answer: Recycling and upcycling of plastics can directly address multiple aspects of 

sustainable (green) chemistry principles. Specifically, the twelve principles of Green 

Chemistry are: 

1. Prevent waste 

2. Atom economy 

3. Less hazardous synthesis 

4. Design benign chemicals 

5. Benign solvents and auxiliaries 

6. Design for energy efficiency 

7. Use of renewable feedstocks 

8. Reduce derivatives 

9. Catalysis (vs. stoichiometric) 

10. Design for degradation 

11. Real-time analysis for pollution prevention 

12. Inherently benign chemistry for accident prevention 

Certainly, recycling and upcycling oftoday's waste plastics could directly address the 

following 1) waste prevention (by keeping plastics out oflandfills and the environment), 

2) atom economy (by keeping plastics in a circular economy instead of a linear flowthrough economy), 3) less hazardous synthesis (many recycling and upcycling strategies 

are less hazardous than the production process for virgin plastics), 6) design for energy 

efficiency (plastics recycling and upcycling is estimated to be able to save 40-90% of the 

inherent energy in plastics, and 9) catalysis (many advanced recycling technologies will 

use chemical and biological catalysis methods to break down plastics to their building 

blocks), likely among others. 

By redesigning "tomorrow's" plastics, the United States could also address 

simultaneously address I) prevent waste (by reducing greenhouse gas emissions relative 

to today's plastics manufacturing), 3) less hazardous synthesis (through the use of 
102 

renewably-sourced feedstocks like those from waste plant materials), 4) design benign 

chemicals (by replacing toxic compounds in today's plastics like bisphenol A with nontoxic compounds), 6) design for energy efficiency (by using bio-based and/or inherently 

recyclable plastics), 7) use of renewable feedstocks (by on-boarding plant-based and 

other renewably-sourced feedstocks to manufacture plastics), and 10) design for 

degradation (by developing compostable, chemically-recyclable, or biodegradable 

plastics), also likely among others. 
103 

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLGY 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY 

"Closing the Loop: Emerging Technologies in Plastics Recycling" 

Questions for the Record to: 

Dr. Gregg Beckham 

Senior Research Fellow 

National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

Submitted by Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici 

1. According to a study in Nature Geoscience, earlier this month, researchers in France 

found thousands of microplastic are airborne and may be polluting the air that we 

breathe. Dr. Beckham, in your testimony you discuss the pervasive nature of 

microplastics in our society, from our soil to our food chain. What do we currently know 

about the effects ofmicroplastics in our ecosystem? What research is needed to better 

understand the consequences for human health? 

Answer: To date, many reports have emerged that have attempted to quantify the 

amount, locations, and prevalence of microplastics in the natural and built environments 

and to understand the sources of these microplastics. However, much remains to be 

understood regarding the toxicological impacts of microplastics on overall ecosystem 

health, the effects on living organisms across the kingdoms of life, and the effect on 

human health specifically. Ecological, biological, and toxicological studies are urgently 

needed to further understand these issues and to quantify the impact that microplastics 

will have on the health of the planet and humankind. 

2. Dr. Beckham, in your testimony you mention that "emissions from plastics combustion, 

beyond carbon dioxide, often contain toxic metals ... causing yet another potential 

environmental cleanup problem while simultaneously adding to the amount of carbon 

dioxide in the atmosphere." How can Congress better support efforts to sustainably break 

down plastics in the recycling process? 

Answer: As mentioned during my testimony, research and development activities that 

harness the ingenuity of the United States research community are urgently needed to 

deliver new, innovative solutions for the United States recycling industry. The American 

Chemistry Council predicted in a 2019 study that the development of advanced recycling 

technologies would add 40,000 jobs and $lOB to the US economy. Advanced chemical 

recycling strategies for plastics would also reduce domestic energy consumption and 

greenhouse gas emissions. 

I suggest that Congress can support research and development efforts in two major areas. 

First, the US research community needs support to develop robust and effective chemical 
104 

recycling technologies that deal with the plastics that we manufacture today, most of 

which are not recycled and are landfilled after a single use. Developing methods to 

breakdown today's plastics and convert them into higher-value, useful materials with a 

second life (upcycling) will incentivize the reclamation of waste plastics in both the 

United States and around the world. 

Second, Congress can also support the development of tomorrow's plastics, which should 

be inherently recyclable-by-design. By using renewably-sourced, bio-based materials 

such as waste plant materials, we have an opportunity to wholly redesign the polymer 

materials economy. The development of new building blocks for tomorrow's plastics will 

require sustained commitment to funding research and development in the bioeconomy 

sector, which could ultimately create many new jobs and a new industry for the United 

States. 
105 

Responses by Mr. Tim Boven to Representative Daniel Lipinski’s 

questions 

(107) 

Appendix II 

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL FOR THE RECORD
108 

LETTER SUBMITTED BY REPRESENTATIVE HALEY STEVENS
109 

Detroit Incinerator, the largest municipal solid waste incinerator in Michigan, has exceeded 

emissions limits more than 750 times since 2013. 

The latest data from the EPA shows that in one year, recycling, composting, combustion 

with energy recovery and landfilling prevented over 181.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide 

equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions, which is comparable to the annual emissions from over 

38.8 million passenger vehicles. 

We know the enormous environmental and economic benefits of recycling, and we know 

that there is a great need for action at the federal level. I am requesting detailed responses to the 

below questions. 

• Why has data on the generation, recycling, composting, energy recovery and landfilling of 

materials and products in the United States not been updated since 2015? 

• What steps, if any, is the Environmental Protection Agency taking to build out the national 

recycling infrastructure of the United States? 

• How is the EPA working to mitigate the ongoing impacts of China's plastic ban and the 

resulting market costs for U.S. cities and states? 

Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to working with you to 

improve our nation's recycling infrastructure and to ensure the United States can best utilize our 

resources to remain competitive and maintain our natural beauty. 

Sincerely, 

Member of Congress 
110 

LETTERS SUBMITTED BY REPRESENTATIVE JIM BAIRD

700 Anderson Hill Road Purchase, NY 10577 

Tel: (312) 821-2386 Tim.Carey@pepsico.com 

The Honorable Haley Stevens 

Chairwoman 

House Science, Space and 

Te,chr:ol<lgy Committee 

Sullco:mnlitt;:e on Research 

and Technology and Technology 

Dear Chairwoman Stevens ar>d Ranking Member Baird, 

for the 

Te<:hn,oloJgies in Plastic ~:ycling. 

where public and private ar>d 

technologies to improve recycling. 

May 2019 

Emerging 

is arJ area 

ideas and 

of PepsiCo's "sustainable plastics vision" of a world where 

waste. We strive to support recycling wherever we business, and 

with signifh:an·t O))e:r.aticms, sales and local in cities and towns 

across the 

part for U.S. recyc1mg. 

we are helping to increase 

infrastructure. We 

app1roaehesto r'ecy<:ling and 

employees, we have a responsibility to do our 

In we became a founding member of the Closed 

$100 2020 to raise rates in the U.S., 

infrastructure and materials and re-processing. To 

across the U.S. and Canada. These investments 

state's largest full-service more than tons of rec:ycJiables 

chain, to with the to introduce universal cw:bs:ide re:cyc:lin.g 

In 2018, we made a $10 million grant to The Re<:yclling Partnership to launch "All in On 

Recycling," an industry-wide challenge to raise $25 to iwprove recycling for 25 million 
111 

families across the country, while supporting a circular economy, simplifying recycling and 

creating stronger, cleaner communities. In addition to contributions from other corporations, the 

more than 2,800 communities that participate in the initiative are expected to triple the collective 

investment, catalyzing roughly $75 million in municipal funding, and bringing the total amount 

of support to $100 million. 

As part of our effort to move towards 100 percent recyclable, compostable, or biodegradeable 

packaging, we successfully converted non-recyclable pressure-sensitive labels on all 89- and 

118-ounce Tropicana products. Additionally, in 2018 PepsiCo joined The NaturALL Bottle 

Alliance, a research consortium with consumer packaged goods industry leaders and a bio-based 

materials development company, Origin Materials, to accelerate the development of innovative 

packaging solutions made with sustainable and renewable resources, including post-consumer 

cardboard, thus creating additional end market demand for this material. 

To support our effort to reach 25 percent recycled content in our products, in 2018 PepsiCo 

entered into a multi-year supply agreement with LoopTM Industries to purchase production 

capacity from Loop's joint venture facility in the U.S. and incorporate LoopTM PET plastic, 

which is 100 percent recycled material, into our product packaging by mid-2020. Loop's 

transformational chemical recycling technology allows now low-value plastics to be diverted, 

recovered and recycled continuously into new, virgin-quality plastic. This means that plastic 

bottles and packaging of any color, transparency or condition, as well as carpet, clothing and 

other polyester textiles that may contain colors, dyes or additives, and even ocean plastics that 

have been degraded by sun and salt can be converted into food-grade packaging. 

Most recently, we signed a national pledge along with partners across the supply chain to work 

with the U.S. Enviroumental Protection Agency to develop a national strategy on recycling rates 

that includes four action areas: enhance recycling infrastructure, create new markets for recycled 

materials, improve public education regarding recycling, and enhance measurement. 

PepsiCo is firmly committed to being a leading force in the industry-wide push for better 

recycling and sustainable packaging in the U.S. and believe our actions have had and will 

continue to have a meaningful impact. We would like to reiterate our support for continued 

discussions and thank the committee for its important work on the subject. Specifically, we 

would like to offer our team and expertise to the committee to help shape their future plans and 

recommendations so that together, we can improve US recycling rates and reduce the loss of 

valuable plastics to landfills and the enviroument. 

Respectfully, 

Tim Carey 

Senior Director, Sustainability 

PepsiCo 
112 

@PLA~!!~.~ 

May 9, 2019 

The Honorable Haley Stevens, Chair 

Committee on Science, Space and 

Technology 

Subcommittee on Research and 

Technology 

2321 Rayburn House Office Building 

Washington, DC 20515 

The Honorable Jim Baird, Ranking 

Committee on Science, Space and 

Technology 

Subcommittee on Research and 

Technology 

2321 Rayburn House Office Building 

Washington, DC 20515 

Dear Chairwoman Stevens, Ranking Member Baird and Members of the 

Subcommittee on Research and Technology, 

The Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS) applauds the House Committee 

on Science, Space & Technology for holding a hearing on innovation and 

emerging technologies in recycling-a vital topic that has a role to play in our 

nation's response to the crisis of plastics entering into the environment. We thank 

all of the witnesses, particularly Mr. Tim Boven, recycling commercial director of 

packaging & specialty plastics for Dow, one of our organization's most dedicated 

member companies. 

PLASTICS believes that, in many ways, we can have an impact on the current 

challenge facing plastics recycling by simply adding more-more facilities, more 

machines, more bins, more sorters and more collection points. Investment in our 

nation's waste management and recycling infrastructure should certainly expand 

the opportunities that every consumer has to recycle their plastic products 

regardless of where they are or what their product is made of. 

But it's crucial that in the process of asking how we can recycle more, we also 

ask ourselves how we can recycle better. Every witness at this hearing nodded to 

the fact that investments in chemical or feedstock recycling have the potential to 

not merely find a use for plastics that have reached the end of their life~which, 

of course, is preferable to them ending up in the landfill or, even worse, litteredbut to find a higher, even more valuable use for these plastics-such as turning 

bottles into car parts and bottle caps into food packaging. 

By finding a way to increase the value of these materials at end of life, we can 

make the recycling process more profitable and less prone to pricing swings. We 

can also innovate to identify new ways to collect difficult to capture plastic 

1425 K Street NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20005 

P 202.974.5200 j plasticsindustry.org 
113 

products and ultimately put them to a better use. By expanding not only our 

capacity, but our capabilities to handle our scrap, we can truly manage these 

materials as resources, which is what they are. 

PLASTICS has always believed in finding market-based solutions to our 

environmental challenges, and in this case the preponderance of recyclable 

plastic materials here in the U.S. presents an enormous economic-and 

environmentally beneficial-opportunity to the public, the research community 

and the industry. As such, PLASTICS has worked both to develop ways to 

capture unrecycled plastics and to create reliable markets for the collected 

materials: 

End of Life Vehicle (ELV) Recycling Project- This seminal demonstration 

project has entered its third and final stage, which will focus on the potential of 

scaling up collection and recovery of plastic car and truck bumpers across the 

U.S. Phase II focused on recovering this material from auto shredders, which 

proved economically challenging. Phase m will instead focus on scaling up 

recovery among auto body repair shops and coiUsion centers-businesses 

already removing the bumpers for other repairs. Phase II did successfully 

demonstrate the consistency in quality of material that can be obtained from 

different samples for ELV bumpers. With proven quality and performance, 

recyclers participating in this demonstration project are working with customers to 

develop new end markets for these materials. 

New End Market Opportunities (NEMO) for film -The NEMO Film project is 

also entering its third and final phase which will focus on finding end-market 

opportunities in asphalt, building and construction, non-food contact packaging, 

and agricultural plastics for plastic wraps, bags and films. Significant progress 

has been made in asphalt evaluation, including preliminary testing that showed a 

significant improvement in the temperature failure rate for asphalt containing a 

3% blend of PE-NEMO film. 

Positive initial results suggest that further testing is warranted. PLASTICS has 

entered a final phase of research with the National Center for Asphalt 

Technology, which wilt yield the performance information necessary to begin to 

take this formulation to demonstration in private applications. 

1425 K Street NW, Sulte 500, washlngton, DC 20005 

P 202.974.5200 l F 202.296.7005 I www.plasticsfndustry.org 
114 

The National Asphalt and Pavement Association has been working with us 

closely on this effort, as well as other universities and groups involved in asphalt 

including Texas A&M. 

Materials Recovery for the Future (MRFF) - The MRFF project is a multi-year 

industry-funded effort to prove out the collection of flexible plastic packaging 

through curbside programs and the ability to effectively sort that material into a 

valuable commodity at a materials recovery facility (MRF). Phase I and Phase U 

of the project demonstrated the feasibility of collection and sorting with the right 

configuration of equipment. We kicked off Phase Ill in June 2018 with the 

announcement of a multi-million dollar investment to retrofit the Total Recycle 

MRF in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Equipment installation was finalized in 

December 2018. Sortation testing will occur through June 2019, and full-scale 

collection and recovery of flexible plastic packaging is scheduled to begin in 

summer 2019. 

If successful, this demonstration project will serve as a model for future MRF 

modernization to accommodate the evolving packaging stream and greatly 

increase the recovery of plastic packaging. 

These projects are noteworthy, but only scratch the surface of what the industry 

is working on to make plastics recycling more widespread, more profitable and 

more reliable. Dow's efforts to develop depolymerization and other feedstock 

recycling technologies is a sterling example, but hardly the only one as 

companies large and small rise to the task of helping the world not only recycle 

more, but recycle better. 

Innovation and investment will be the twin pillars that support this effort to shift 

the plastics economy from a linear model to a circular one. Innovation, of course, 

also requires investment-the academic, corporate and consumer universes will 

all have a part to play in discovering what works, how we can scale it across the 

entire U.S. in a way that it is positioned to not only handle the scrap materials of 

today, but of tomorrow as well. By building a robust domestic recycling 

infrastructure, we ensure that our recycling markets stay insulated from shifts in 

global demand, pricing or packaging preferences. The work is well underway to 

find the newest technologies that suit today's plastics economy and PLASTICS 

welcomes the opportunity to work with policymakers to ensure that this work 

bears fruit. 

1425 K Street NW, Su!te 500, Washington, DC 20005 

P 202.974.5200 j F 202.296.7005 I www.plasticslndustry.org 
115 

It's no secret that the largest contributor, globally, to marine litter is not the United 

States, so why have this conversation here? Well, in the U.S., the states have 

historically been known as the laboratories of democracy. Globally, the U.S. has 

often been the laboratory of ideas and technologies that make the world a better 

place. The challenge facing us will only be solved through a combination of 

investment, innovation, collaboration and, of course, American leadership. 

Together we can create a new materials recovery model that can be successfully 

implemented here, and then exported like so many other American ideals to 

other countries to strike a truly global solution to a truly global problem. 

We look forward to working with Congress and the Administration to advance 

these goals and stand ready to provide any additional resources or information 

they might require. 

Sincerely, 

Patty Long 

Interim President & CEO 

Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS) 

1425 K Street NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20005 

P 202.974.5200 j F 202.296.7005 ! www.p!astlcsindustry.org 
116 

CLOSING THE LOOP: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES IN PLASTICS RECYCUNG 

April 29, 2019 

The Honorable Haley Stevens 

227 Cannon HOB 

Washington, DC 20515 

The Honorable Jim Baird 

532 Cannon HOB 

Washington, DC 20515 

Subject: Support for Chemical Recycling and Recycling Infrastructure 

Dear Chairwoman Stevens, Ranking Member Baird and Members of the Subcommittee on Research and 

Technology, 

S/\81C is a global chemicals company with a long-term presence in the United States of America, and a 

strong growth agenda based on product and feedstock diversification. As a company that manufactures 

materia is, our strategy aims to keep plastics within the materials value chain, and we leading 

action on chemical recycling, which we see as an important component of a transition to a 

economy. chemical can help create jobs and revenue while keeping valuable plastic 

resources them back into valuable feedstock for the petrochemical industry 

!n 2018, we announced the development of the world's first demo~plant (in the Netherlands) to refine and 

upgrade waste plastic for use in commercial manufacturing. SABJC is a plastic-to-oil 

company that converts low~qua!ity, mixed plastic waste otherwise destined for or landfill into 

a synthetic oil that can be used as a feedstock into our plastic process, We 

and upgrade the oil so that it can be used for the production of traditional npicmrh,,mirPk This project 

marks a significant milestone for SABIC's efforts to build a circular economy, and is expected to enter 

commercial production in 2021. 

Post-consumer plastics are too valuable a materiai to waste. Legislation and research supporting 

chemical can help create an enabling environment for businesses to create jobs 

plastic resources out of landfills converting them back into valuable 

feedstock for the industry. A recent American Chemistry Council study on the economic 

impact of advanced plastics recycling shows there is potential for the creation of as many as 9,400 direct 

jobs and as much as $4.1 billion in direct economic output per year: 

SABiC 
117 

The plastics industry is making a push states for new laws at the state !eve! to make It easier to build 

next~generation recycling plants that turn waste plastics into feedstock and fuels, and we recently 

secured legislative victories in Iowa and Tennessee. 

The new laws sought by plastics companies and the American Chemistry Council, of which SABIC is an 

active member, would regulate the plants as manufacturing operations, rather than landfills or solid 

waste disposal facilities, making it easier for new facilities to get government approvals. 

The push in state governments is linked to the 

Waste. Research into chemica! recycling is a key part 

hard-to-recycle plastics. 

Infrastructure Investment 

broader $15 billion Alliance to End Plastic 

initiative's attempt to find viable markets for 

SABIC encourages Congress to develop and advance an infrastructure investment package that indudes 

and expands upon opportunities in solid waste management and recycling to improve our national 

infrastructure, promote sustainable development and create jobs. We believe 

and recycled materia is is critical to America's 

create jobs throughout the United States. 

Recent decisions by China to reduce or end the importation of scrap materiai from other nations are 

disrupting throughout the United States, and make it more critical that we make new 

investments recycling capacity. investment in such capacity, millions more 

tons of otherwise recoverable and recyclable material be !ost to landfills each year. This material is a 

commodity that can be at the forefront of advances in sustainability. For example, as companies strive to 

meet global targets for waste diversion or increased use of post-consumer recycled materials, they need 

a reliable and steady long-term supply of recoverable and recyclable materials to make the necessary 

advances in packaging in order to meet those targets. 

We urge support for including the following concepts in any federal infrastructure legislation that Is 

developed: 

Rei:wnttina Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) with advanced sorting equipment that can identity 

and properly a of packaging forms, including flexible film and smaller items made 

of otherwise recyclable 

Quicker permitting of f'-1RFs, plastics recycling facilities, and conversion technology (chemical 

recycling) facilities that advance responsible environmental standards, creating valuable chemicclls 

and energy products that produce positive environmental impacts while creating additional capacity. 

Increased use of recycled material in infrastructure projects where appropriate. 

Broadened use of private bonds for recycling projects. 

!ncentive grants for state and governments to expand curbside recycling options and the 

of materials collected Providing access to curbside recycling to a!! U.S. residents (!ess than 

presently have the same level of access to curbside recycling as trash collection) will 

standardize the types of materia! that can be and are recovered across the country. 

Education and training to improve understanding of what is recyclable, and to promote the job 

creation aspect of the recycling process that will support American manufacturing jobs, the U.S. 

economy and the environment. 

Alliance to End Plastic Waste 

SAB!C has long been engaged in our industry's efforts to reduce plastic waste. From 2014 to 2018, we 

chaired the World Plastics Council, a global, industry-led effort to develop sustainable solutions to marine 

debris. Supporting the growth and development of a circular economy, one in which products and raw 

materials are not wasted, but rather used to create new, valuable products, is a key goal of SABle's 

sustainability platform. 
118 

Æ 

bet:onlin•g afotmcling member of the Ailiance to End Plastic Waste 

Thisnew1non-1orofitorg<>nization,consisting 

plastic waste 

leaking irotothe env-iror>m<?nt, Th.o ~<CP\•\1 hoo al-nbitio•ustarge'ts to "'tori< withgo-vernrrlents, multilateral 

the movement. 

Cleanup of concentrated areas of waste in the environment, particularly in rivers that carry landbased waste to the sea. 

As no one company, country, or community can solve this issue on its own, SABIC is committed to 

working with other Alliance members around the world. 

Sincerely. 

Gretchen R. Govoni 

2500 OtyWest Bivd 

Houston, TX 77042