When thinking about the plastic waste problem, in which more than 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced every year while less than 10% of it is recycled, it’s easy to give up hope. The types and varieties of plastic are vast and the solutions seem to be few. The root problem confronting any plastic recycling solution is the need for almost all plastics to be thoroughly sorted and cleaned prior to being processed into usable components. Effectively cleaning and sorting involves extensive time, energy, and resources that make the process either physically or economically impractical.
For instance, let’s take a look at artificial turf. It is used in sports fields and landscaping, and is a complex combination of polyethylene, polypropylene, rubber or silica infill, backing layers, and adhesives. That is a lot to sort through and separate before a polyethylene or polypropylene recycling system can be used to create a second-generation product from it.
One leader in the synthetic turf industry, TenCate, launched a pilot recycling program in 2022 in conjunction with ExxonMobil and Cyclyx International. It started with 50 fields in California. The turf is shipped to Southern California where it is shredded and sorted, then shipped to a location in Texas where Cyclyx further processes it, before heading to ExxonMobil’s Baytown recycling facility to create plastic pellets and polymers that can be used to make other plastic products.
Source: TenCate ESG Report 2024
This is no slam on TenCate, a company committed to finding fully recyclable and reusable solutions for its products. But the process is chunky, requires a lot of shipping, and hasn’t really been discussed at all since its launch three years ago. It is briefly mentioned on pages 58-59 of the company’s 2024 ESG report. The company is more focused now on synthetic turfs that are built solely from polyethylene, and that don’t utilize infill, to simplify the end-of-life recycling process.
As of 2023, there were about 19,000 synthetic turf athletic fields in the United States alone, with 1,500 new installations during that year. Turf fields last 8 – 15 years or so, depending on a variety of factors. A single artificial turf field can weigh between 200 and 300 tons. That is a lot of synthetic grass that needs to be disposed of every year, and these figures don’t even take into account other uses like residential and playground applications.
A Potential Solution
Aduro Clean Technologies (NASDAQ: ADUR) (CSE: ACT) (FSE: 9D5) recently announced that it has tested its proprietary Hydrochemolytic™ technology (HCT) for the ability to recycle synthetic turf. HCT is capable of recycling several types of plastic in one continuous process with minimal sorting and cleaning requirements.
The artificial grass test, conducted in concert with a leading global supplier in the industry, showed very promising results. HCT was able to handle the complex construction of the turf with minimal pre-processing, creating a variety of useful hydrocarbon compounds that could be used to make next-generation plastic products. Aduro is continuing its investigation, in cooperation with industry stakeholders, to further define and refine the process but the results are very encouraging.
The company believes it has a major opportunity in the processing of carpets as well. Carpets present similar construction and challenges as synthetic turf – complex multi-layer construction with a variety of contaminants. These are just two examples of the diverse range of products in the crosshairs of Aduro’s development efforts. While most recycling companies are battling over the availability of very clean feedstock featuring a single type of plastic, Aduro is proving it can handle the more problematic and widely available supply of mixed plastics.
Commercialization on the Horizon
The company is nearing completion of its Next Generation Process Pilot Plant, and plans to build a commercial-scale facility in 2026 that will be the final step before commercialization of HCT. The recycling facilities feature a modular design, easily scalable from very small localized applications up to the large regional processing plants currently used by recycling companies. The scalability is a key to solving some of the economic challenges presented by plastic recycling, with the potential to eliminate many of the transportation costs associated with the present-day model based on huge centralized factories. In fact, Aduro sees other recyclers as potential customers and partners rather than competition as HCT could be added to current facilities to expand capabilities and recycle feedstocks that are currently going to waste.
Aduro has demonstrated that it can process polystyrene, polyethylene, and polypropylene (together these constitute about 70% of the plastic waste that enters municipal waste streams in the United States) with minimal sorting and cleaning while using significantly less energy and creating substantially lower levels of carbon emissions than current methods. It has been working with global leaders like Shell and TotalEnergies, among others, to perfect the technology over the last few years. With commercialization just around the corner, Aduro is poised to reshape how we approach the plastic waste issue. Stay tuned for further developments.
