In Plastic Products, Recycled Isn’t Always

The plastic CamelBak bottles displayed in a Target in East Hanover, New Jersey, offer a promise to ecologically conscious buyers. On the front of each is a bright blue sticker with the words “Tritan Renew made with 50% recycled material.”

In reality, however, the amount of recycled plastic that went into making the bottles may be nowhere near 50%.

Eastman Chemical, a company with $9.2 billion in annual revenues based in Kingsport, Tennessee, introduced the durable plastic called Tritan Renew four years ago, telling manufacturers it was made with “up to 50% recycled content from waste plastic.” It quickly caught on with companies trying to reach their sustainability goals or eager to appeal to consumers who want to keep plastics out of landfills and oceans.

Dozens of brands now use the material. CamelBak and Nalgene use it in sports water bottles. Ferragamo offers Tritan Renew sunglasses. Stanley Black & Decker even made a new power tool line called Reviva from the plastic. But there is no guarantee that any particular bottle, power tool or pair of sunglasses actually contains recycled plastic.

“It could be a very low percentage that is physically in there; it could be a high percentage,” said C. Jason Pierce, a senior technical leader for the Circular Economy and Life Cycle Assessment at Eastman Chemical, when asked this spring about the amount of recycled plastic in Tritan Renew that is used to make water bottles sold by CamelBak and others. “You can’t know how much.”

So how does Eastman make its claim that Tritan Renew contains up to 50% recycled material? It uses a green certification system called “mass balance.”

That methodology allows companies like Eastman to build up credits for recycling plastic and then apply them to the manufacture of any number of products, regardless of how much recycled material they contain. (More on this later.)

Critics argue that mass balance accounting opens the door to corporate greenwashing and creates a system where consumers don’t know whether or how much recycled material was used in products that claim to be sustainable or “green.”

“If you divorce the recycled content from the physical product, and just start using these accounting schemes, you destroy consumer confidence in recycling,” said Lee Bell, a policy adviser to the International Pollutants Elimination Network, a global network of advocacy groups that works on pollution issues. “It effectively destroys truth in labeling.”

That view, the company argues, takes too narrow a perspective. Consumers can be assured “that they are directly supporting recycling that really did happen,” Pierce said. “Materials that would have otherwise gone to the landfill or incinerator are being recycled. It’s just a little bit of a different way of thinking about recycling. More of a bigger picture or systems view of it. ”

The proliferation of plastic waste — more than 400 million metric tons a year globally — has led to calls to produce less plastic, which is derived from petrochemicals, or to recycle more. But plastics are much more challenging to recycle than metal or paper. Despite the chasing arrows symbol on most plastics in the U.S., only a few types, those with the numbers 1 or 2 on them, are reliably recycled in most parts of the country.

Less than 10% of plastic waste is recycled, and the vast majority ends up in landfills, incinerated or in the world’s oceans and rivers. All of which has created a new pressure — and an opportunity — for the makers of plastics, like Eastman.

What is mass balance accounting and how does it work?

To grasp what mass balance accounting entails, you first have to know a bit about the two methods of plastic recycling.

The first, which has been around for decades, involves sorting, washing, shredding and melting down plastic waste and reshaping it into pellets. Much of the recycled plastic produced by this method, called mechanical recycling, is of lesser quality than the original. And only certain types of plastics can be recycled mechanically.

The second, newer method, chemical recycling, is an energy-intensive process that typically uses high temperatures, pressurization and chemical solvents or other chemical processes not to simply melt plastic, but to break it down into its chemical building blocks. The recycled chemicals are then mixed with all sorts of other materials, including fossil-fuel-derived virgin plastic, to make new products.

This year, Eastman began operating one of the largest chemical plastic recycling plants in the world. Located near the company’s headquarters in Tennessee, the plant uses methanol, heat and pressure to transform plastic waste. It takes plastics not accepted in most curbside recycling programs, like clamshell containers, colored plastics used in food and beverage packaging and plastic fibers used in carpets and textiles.

Eastman wants to be able to market as recycled the products made with this material. But while it’s theoretically possible to physically track plastic pellets from recycled water bottles to a new life as plastic lawn furniture, it’s virtually impossible to trace basic chemicals dissolved from plastic waste and mixed with other materials to any particular batch of plastic products.

That’s where mass balance accounting comes in.

Mass balance is a certification system that coffee, palm oil and textile industries have used to market sustainably sourced raw materials mixed together with non-sustainably sourced materials.

Eastman and other chemical recyclers, like Exxon Mobil, use this system to allow their mix of recycled and virgin plastics to be certified as recycled. Under this system, Eastman says it tallies the building-block molecules it produces from recycling plastic and lists them in a materials inventory. It gets a recycling credit for those molecules and, under the mass balance protocol, it can then assign the credit to any number of products made by the company. The broken-down recycled waste products go “into a very wide spectrum of Eastman polymer products,” Pierce said. “It’s not just one product that gets the content.”

But the system allows the company to assign all or most of the credits to a single product, as long as the tally of the molecules necessary to make that product matches — or “balances” — the tally of recycled molecules on its inventory. So the company can market Tritan Renew as “up to 50% recycled plastic,” even if it has little recycled material in it because something it manufactured contained those recycled chemical building blocks.

And when a product is marketed as recycled or sustainable, it can command a higher price.

Eastman, which was spun off from Eastman Kodak in 1994, makes more than 1,000 products, including preservatives for animal feed and resins that protect cars from scratches.

The Tritan Renew, a premium-priced material, has become an important new product for the company. “We have a lot of customers that have been with us for a long time that are using this recycled content claim as a way to enhance their product offering or drive new volume growth,” Mark Costa, CEO of Eastman, told Wall Street analysts and investors on an earnings call in late July.

CamelBak is one of those companies. Its blue stickers announce that its bottles contain 50% recycled material, without qualification. When told that Eastman said it couldn’t know precisely how much recycled plastic went into the Tritan Renew that was used to make its bottles, CamelBak responded that it would be updating its packaging and marketing materials. In the future, the company wrote, they would reflect that bottles “on average,” were made with 50% recycled material, and that the claim was made through the mass balance allocation process.

Who certifies ‘mass balance’?

Environmental activists argue that mass balance accounting is a kind of shell game that lacks transparency and makes it impossible to know for sure if plastic is being reused.

Eastman says that it follows strict protocols.

“Eastman’s use of mass balance has never been a creative math exercise,” Scott Ballard, the president of Eastman’s plastic division, said in an emailed statement. “It’s a data-driven method that enables a faster transition to a circular economy and is validated by independent, third parties.”

The company declined to provide specific figures showing how much recycled material goes into its manufacturing process and how many credits it assigns to the products it sells, but said it did give that level of detail to an organization that certifies mass balance accounting.

That organization, the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification, or ISCC, is an association of corporations and nonprofit organizations, based in Cologne, Germany.

Environmental activists, however, question the neutrality of ISCC. Six of its seven board members come from the chemical or fuel industries, including Eastman, Dow, and BP.

“The ISCC is made up of all of the big chemical companies,” said Jessica Roff, a program manager with Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a nonprofit climate group. “It’s really a system of self-certification.”

This year, the ISCC audited and certified Eastman’s Tennessee plant. But while the publicly available reports state that the plant received inputs of mixed waste plastic and produced outputs of various chemical compounds like esters, glycols and copolyesters, they do not enumerate the amounts or which products they ended up in.

In response to emailed questions, the ISCC noted that the mass balance methodology, “is no guarantee that the recycled content, for instance, has been incorporated in the finished good.” Rather, when plastic waste is used at the beginning of the supply chain, it creates credits that can be attributed to the product-to-be-sold, “ensuring that both input and output are balanced.”

Despite hiccups with the new recycling plant, Eastman said that, in June, a mix of more than 50% recycled plastic was fed into its largest Tritan manufacturing line.

The company believes it will be able to recycle 250 million pounds of plastic waste each year once the plant is operating at its full capacity sometime next year.

However, it’s unclear how much, if any recycled plastic material was in Tritan Renew from 2019 to earlier this year, when the new Tennessee recycling plant was first up and running. During those years, the company used another chemical recycling technique that it said was limited because it required clean and clear plastic bottles, which are more expensive to buy than other types of plastic waste. Eastman’s sustainability reports say it recycled 18.1 million pounds of plastic waste in 2022 and about 12 million in 2021.

When asked whether there was any physical recycled material in Tritan Renew plastic during those four years, the company did not respond directly, instead saying that “certified mass balance is used at the facility where Tritan Renew is manufactured.”

Does anyone certify the certifiers?

In the United States, there are no standards for mass balance certification. But the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees some marketing claims, is updating its so-called “Green Guides,” which provide guidelines for companies making claims about environmental impact in advertising and product labels. The regulator asked for public input about whether methods like mass balance should be allowed in making recycling claims.

Proponents of using the method for plastic recycling say that without mass balance allocation, companies would be forced to create separate manufacturing facilities to keep recycled materials from mixing with virgin plastic.

“This would be akin to requiring renewable energy sources to build an entirely new electrical grid dedicated to the transmission of green electricity,” the Consumer Brands Association, which represents the consumer packaged goods industry, said in a letter to the FTC last year.

Climate activists — as well as mechanical recyclers — are urging the FTC to reject mass balance allocation accounting for recycled materials in goods.

These accounting methods provide “little to no physical traceability of recycled content,” the Association of Plastic Recyclers, which represents mechanical recyclers, wrote in its comment letter to the FTC, adding, “Consumers must trust there is actual recycled content in the actual product.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .