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Four ways BASF is recycling materials in North America
Recycling is a fundamental tool to promote a circular economy and ensure that we use our earth’s limited resources in the best way possible, while minimizing waste and saving energy. Today, a wide range of products can actually be recycled and inserted into the production chain as raw materials, including plastics, but also metals, batteries, electronics, clothing, etc., reducing the amount of waste we send to landfills or incinerators.
As part of BASF’s efforts to promote a circular economy and close the loop, we have developed and adopted several recycling pathways to ensure our products can be incorporated into the value chain, leveraging our Verbund or integrated manufacturing system.
Discover some of the ways we are recycling and reutilizing materials below.
Mechanical recycling is a solution that can be applied to different classes of materials, including plastics, lithium-ion batteries (commonly found in electric vehicles) and metals.
When it comes to plastic, mechanical recycling is the preferred solution because it’s less expensive and more environmentally friendly. It’s considered to have lower CO2 emissions than other methods and than producing the same plastic through conventional methods. These materials are collected, sorted, shredded, melted and transformed into secondary raw materials that are then incorporated into BASF’s production chain, giving them new life and use.
However, it comes with its share of challenges. The plastic waste needs to be collected first, which, when it comes to the United States poses a challenge, since only about 15% of plastic waste is collected, unlike for instance, Japan, where the number is closer to 90%.
Once the plastic is collected, it needs to be sorted. This is a key step, since some plastic types cannot be mixed, otherwise the recycled product could not be reused. Fortunately, trinamix GmbH, a subsidiary of BASF, has developed a mobile near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy device that can easily scan a plastic product and identify it in a matter of seconds, simplifying the sorting process.
Cleaning the products is also a challenging part of the process, since it requires removing impurities, as well as labels, inks, adhesives, and any other residue they may have, which in many cases, means the different layers need to be separated in order to effectively clean the entire product.
After that comes reprocessing, which means plastics need to be heated and melted, but this can be really complex. Many times, it’s difficult to identify the source of the plastic, its quality or age, and all of these traits can affect the processing and degrade the polymer, leading to a low-quality product. To avoid this, the plastics need additional chemical stabilizers, and to identify the best solution to avoid poor quality, extensive testing is required.
Chemical recycling, which includes several technologies, is a complementary method to mechanical recycling, as it can reutilize products that cannot be recycled mechanically, either because of the cost, the environmental impact or because the final products result in a lower quality or performance. By using both methods, we can increase our recycling rates of plastic waste.
Through this method, the polymer chains of plastics are chemically broken down into building blocks that can then be used as feedstock, for example, in the form of syngas, pyrolysis oil or monomers, without having to incorporate any additional chemicals to the process. This results in products with the same quality as the ones produced from fossil resources.
Chemical recycling can be applied to mixed plastic waste streams, for example, of polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS), reducing the costs associated with sorting them.
Pyrolysis can convert approximately 70% of the plastic waste into secondary raw materials.
One of the most used ways to chemically recycle plastic waste is through thermal decomposition under absence of oxygen, also known as pyrolysis. In its Chemcycling® initiative, BASF collaborates with pyrolysis technology partners who reprocess post-consumer plastic waste industrially into pyrolysis oil, which is then incorporated as raw material, replacing fossil resources and attributed to manufactured products through the mass balance approach, and carry the suffix “Ccycled®”. Mass balanced Ccycled® products, which today are approximately 320, are certified by a third party according to sustainability certification schemes such as REDcert2 and ISCC PLUS.
ChemCycling was launched in the U.S. in 2024, at the Port Arthur site in Texas, using secondary feedstock derived from hard-to-recycle or otherwise incinerated mixed plastic waste in BASF’s value chain. An example of a Ccycled® product is the Ultramid® line, which meets the quality and hygiene standards for food packaging, textiles, construction, engineering plastics and electric materials.
Electric vehicles (EV) have steadily increased in the United States in recent years. In fact, according to Q3 2024 EV sales, the market share has reached almost 9% and this trend is set to continue in the coming years. Batteries are an essential part of EVs, and in order to produce them, they require specific metals, such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese. Although the batteries themselves have a lifespan, the metals do not, and they can be recovered and reutilized.
To ensure a transition into cleaner forms of transportation such as EVs in a sustainable way, we need to recycle batteries and more specifically, the metals inside. In 2023, BASF reached an agreement with Nanotech Energy, the American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) and TODA Advanced Materials Inc. where BASF enables de production of lithium-ion batteries with recycled content, while reducing the dependency on primary mining sources.
Through this process, battery scraps and off-spec materials from Nanotech in California are recycled by ABTC, and the metals recovered by them are then used by both BASF and TODA to develop precursors and cathode active materials, which will then be incorporated by Nanotech into their battery cell production, establishing a local supply of recycled metals and effectively closing the battery loop in North America.
These four ways we are recycling materials bring us closer to meeting our goal of doubling the sales with Loop Solutions, and achieve €10 billion by 2030. Advancing circularity will be key to reducing our fossil resource consumption, completing our green transformation, supporting the sustainability goals of our customers and creating value for the community, driving change through every action.
Published on November 15, 2024, by Mariana Licio.
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