Good link you've got there.

Eastman is the real deal with going all the way back to useful monomers chemically, at the other end of the spectrum compared to some who are pyrolyzing plastic to turn it into gross poorly characterized oils.

Chemical changes occur in all of these non-physical processes but this is not mere "chemical recycling" with solvents, Eastman is all the way to molecular recycling by using controlled reactions to break down the polymers back into useful monomers. Rather than things like simple pyrolysis which basically turns waste plastic into never-before-seen types of waste oil.

But that's not nearly enough, it may be tough to economically operate unless the recovered building blocks can be combined with an existing stream of like raw materials which are already being turned into fully-value-added newly-molded polymer products which are well-established. And with the final wholesale/retail product having the same properties as when all virgin material was used, that's the highest value you're going to get from the material at hand. They're no dummy, they're there. It doesn't even matter that much if the recovered monomers cost them more or less than virgin raw material would do, they're going to use it all up anyway and turn it into final product. This is no refinery, this is a chemical plant. Eh, they're all huge and all look the same, jk, they don't try to make anything that's cheap enough to burn. As I was alluding to in my other lengthy comment, if the polymer plant making the plastic is big enough to put out miles of railcars, then you would need a recycling plant just as big capable of taking in just as many railcars just as fast or you will never be able to even recycle at an equal rate of production from that one polymer plant.

Now Eastman has got it down and it is circular enough to pay for itself under legitimate accounting and provide what I would call a "significant reduction in carbon increases compared to alternatives". Taking advantage of the specialty plastics market as it stands now.

So maybe as long as more new polymer is being made than the waste they are taking in, will there be enough capability to continue to absorb the intended recycle amount :/

And this is most exemplary and definitely worth building the additional plants they have on the drawing board. As good as it gets so far, they're integrated, technology goals met, these plants are huge, at full scale, pay for themselves impressively, but still might not be economically feasible, if there were not increasing demand for Eastman's highly-value-added polymers in general as a truly positive business outlook.

You have to figure that to really cut back on plastic waste overload, you would have to cut back on the number of new polymer plants being built, but this is a step in the right direction building a combined production/recycling facility rather than a mere production-only plant. And it can generate a positive cash flow which is rare when the default is a financial black hole for recycling alone. Just don't think it will really make present net tonnage in circulation go down at any time. That would require a decline in overall demand for plastic worldwide.