Together with Heikki Färkkilä, Vice President of Chemical Recycling bij Neste, we dive deeper into the world of chemical recycling in order to understand what exciting breakthroughs are on the horizon for the fast-moving industry.
How will we recycle plastics twenty years in the future? According to Heikki Färkkilä, Vice President of Chemical Recycling at Neste, “The big breakthrough and the vision of the industry should be to create the ability to run the whole system based on recycled and renewable feedstock, without any virgin fossil feeds.”
Färkkilä is particularly focused on the role of recycling in this picture. He envisions a future where communities around the world process their own waste locally, and turn plastics that would otherwise become landfill or end up in incineration, into new materials, which can then be traded internationally.
Waste would become a valuable commodity in this scenario, but instead of thinking on a local-scale only, Färkkilä sees that we should move towards circularity in plastics at an international scale. “We should rethink our approach to plastics all the way from product design to collection of materials for reuse and recycling. And chemical recycling will need to play a much bigger role than it does today.”
Färkkilä predicts that there are three bigger breakthroughs that will happen over the next few decades to make this future possible: a global circular infrastructure, risk-free investing in chemical recycling, and multiple changes in regulations. For a deeper explanation of these breakthroughs, please click on the link.