ExplainerOctober 9, 2026
LaMa separates the gel problem from the plastic recycling stream
Superabsorbents complicate wet processing; reported 200 kg/hour operation does not establish a route for every used diaper or construction mat.
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Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.
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ExplainerOctober 9, 2026
Hereon puts breaking points into a styrene-based plastic
Bio-based content and deliberate chain cleavage change material design; fragments are not yet proof of a closed recycling loop.
ExplainerOctober 8, 2026
Modified cellulose catches lead in solar-cell recycling solvents
Sulfur-bearing binding sites work beyond water, but removal efficiency is not yet a closed metal-and-solvent recycling loop.
TeardownOctober 8, 2026
Reclinker makes a cement route inside steel recycling
Reactivating demolition cement in an electric arc furnace uses existing infrastructure, but feedstock, standards and carbon boundaries still matter.
ExplainerOctober 5, 2026
AMP Portsmouth: mixed-waste sorting and biochar are two different proof points
The expanded system links recovery with carbon removal, but operating sorting capacity is not operating biochar capacity.
Myth-BustingOctober 5, 2026
Aluminium foil is recyclable material — not an automatic blue-bin item
Cleanliness, item size and local sorting rules decide whether household foil has a real recovery route.
ExplainerOctober 3, 2026
Cornell’s DEER process repairs electrodes before they become black mass
An electrochemical bath preserves electrode structure, but coin-cell recovery is not yet a pack-scale recycling service.
TeardownOctober 2, 2026
Reju’s two-minute polyester claim leaves most of the process outside the stopwatch
Fast depolymerisation is not the same as fast textile recycling; sorting, purification and future plant operation determine the result.
TeardownOctober 1, 2026
India’s e-waste tax notice: paperwork is not a material balance
Reported allegations involving appliance companies reveal why invoices, recycling certificates and physical processing need separate verification.
TeardownSeptember 30, 2026
TNO's laser solar recycling: 99.998% silicon, unknown throughput
A nanosecond-laser process recovers silicon and silver from old panels at 97% rates and very high purity. The open questions are panels per hour and cracked real-world modules.
TeardownSeptember 27, 2026
MacroCycle and Meta: a recycling deal made of credits, not plastic
Meta will buy environmental attribute credits from MacroCycle's solvent-based PET recycling. The chemistry is novel. The plant does not exist yet, and Meta is not buying any recycled material.
ExplainerSeptember 27, 2026
Indonesia's BRIN plan: waste to syngas, carbon nanotubes and captured CO2 — how each step works
BRIN is assembling AI sorting, gasification, plastic-to-nanotube conversion at 1,600 °C and calcium looping into one pipeline. Here is the chemistry of each stage and how much of it exists.
TeardownSeptember 25, 2026
Greyparrot at Sunset Park: counting 91,000 lost cans a day is not the same as saving them
Greyparrot's cameras say 89% of aluminium passing a Brooklyn MRF is recoverable. That is a measurement of loss, not an improvement in recovery — the pilots that would show that have not run yet.
ExplainerSeptember 25, 2026
The EU wants 15% recycled plastic in new cars. Today it is 2.5%. Here is why the gap is so hard
The End-of-Life Vehicles Regulation mandates 15% recycled plastic from 2032 and 25% from 2036. To see why that is difficult, follow a car through the shredder.
Myth-BustingSeptember 23, 2026
Myth: if you drop off e-waste at a recycler, it gets recycled
A Basel Action Network investigation found eight of ten U.S. firms shipping e-waste to Southeast Asia held R2v3 'responsible recycling' certification. Here is where drop-off electronics can really end up.
TeardownSeptember 23, 2026
Bobine's 'electrified plastic recycling': striking numbers, no independent evidence
The French startup claims +45% yield, −60% energy and −45% cost by heating a catalyst with induction to turn plastic waste into olefins. Every figure is self-reported, and none has a baseline.
TeardownSeptember 22, 2026
The Recycling Partnership's 'Evolving Ton': excellent data, no prescription
Cartons up 61%, mixed paper down 34%, plastics now outweigh paper in U.S. recycling. The new report is the best picture of the bin we have — and says almost nothing about what to do.
ExplainerSeptember 22, 2026
Alberta bans solar panels from landfill: how panel recycling works, and who pays
From October 1, Alberta charges $14 on every new panel and bans end-of-life panels from landfill. Here is how a panel is taken apart, and why the fee is already contested.
Myth-BustingSeptember 20, 2026
Your Receipts Do Not Belong in the Paper Recycling
Thermal receipt paper carries a bisphenol coating. Put it in the paper stream and the chemistry ends up in recycled paper products.
ExplainerSeptember 19, 2026
800,000 Tons of Recyclable Film and Not Enough Buyers
The US generates roughly 800,000 tons of recoverable polyethylene film a year. Twenty-seven reclaimers can process it, and fewer than half will take household film.
ExplainerSeptember 19, 2026
California Recycles 37% of Its Carpet. That Number Took Fifteen Years
The first carpet EPR programme in the US now runs 174 drop-off sites and recycles 78.5 million pounds a year. It is also a lesson in how slowly EPR moves.
TeardownSeptember 18, 2026
Worn Again Has a Polycotton Recycling Plant. Half of It Is Running
Separating polyester from cotton is textile recycling's central unsolved problem. Worn Again's Swiss facility has module one commissioned and module two on paper.
ExplainerSeptember 18, 2026
A Catalyst That Dissolves a Plastic Designed Never to Melt
pDCPD is a cross-linked thermoset with no recycling route. A ruthenium catalyst and a stirred solvent take it apart - and leave the carbon fibre intact.
Myth-BustingSeptember 17, 2026
Shredded Paper Is Paper. That Does Not Make It Recyclable
Most recycling programmes reject loose shredded paper, and the reason is mechanical: the strips are the wrong size for the machines that sort paper.
TeardownSeptember 17, 2026
Envetec Says It Can Recycle Biohazardous Medical Waste. What Is Actually Proven?
On-site shredding and disinfection that turns regulated medical waste into recyclable polymer flake. The disinfection is certified. Most of the headline numbers are not.
ExplainerSeptember 17, 2026
Quebec Made Blue-Bin Glass Good Enough to Become a Bottle Again
For decades half of Quebec's curbside glass was buried as landfill cover. A $20M optical-sorting upgrade finally gets it clean enough for the furnace.
TeardownSeptember 16, 2026
Cairo's CanBank Machines Take the Cans. The Zabaleen Were Already Taking Them.
Two reverse vending machines in Dokki pay phone credit for bottles and cans — the exact fraction that has funded an informal collection economy for a century.
TeardownSeptember 15, 2026
Pirelli, Pyrum, BASF and Synthos: A Tyre Loop With an Accounting Step in the Middle
Four companies, six steps, and one link where the recycled content is attributed rather than physically traced. The pyrolysis is real. The loop is partly bookkeeping.
Myth-BustingSeptember 14, 2026
"It's Paper, So It's Recyclable": What Actually Happens to a Coffee Cup
A hot-drink cup is about 95% paperboard. The other 5% is a polyethylene liner, and that 5% is why most mills reject the cup outright — even when you put it in the right bin.
ExplainerSeptember 13, 2026
Terahertz Sorting: Seeing Through the Plastics That Near-Infrared Cannot
Near-infrared sorters are blind to black plastic and confused by multilayer film. Terahertz sensing sees through both. The physics is real; the belt speed and the detector price are not there yet.
ExplainerSeptember 13, 2026
Silex World and Magnet Recycling: The Chemistry Works, the Collection Does Not
Recovering neodymium and dysprosium from used magnets has been technically demonstrated many times over. Almost none of it happens, and the reason has nothing to do with metallurgy.
TeardownSeptember 12, 2026
Kirin and JSW Put PET Depolymerisation Inside a Twin-Screw Extruder
Chemical recycling of PET normally means a stirred tank and several hours. Kirin and JSW have moved the reaction into a continuous extruder. If the numbers hold, the interesting part is throughput per unit of capital.
Myth-BustingSeptember 11, 2026
"Compostable" Is a Facility Spec, Not a Property of the Object
Certified compostable packaging is engineered to break down in a hot industrial windrow. Put it in a garden bin, a recycling bin or a landfill and it behaves like ordinary plastic — because in those conditions, it is.
TeardownSeptember 11, 2026
R3 Lithium in Covington: A $15M Series A Moving Into a $150M Building
R3 Lithium is taking over battery recycling capacity in Covington, Georgia that Ascend Elements spent far more to build. The asset is real. The question is whether the funding matches what refining lithium to spec actually costs.
TeardownSeptember 11, 2026
ReBioCycle's PLA Loop: What a Closed Loop Means When Nobody Publishes the Yield
An EU project says it has closed the loop on PLA — sorting, depolymerising and repolymerising bioplastic back to virgin-grade. The chemistry is sound. The numbers that decide whether it matters are missing.
TeardownSeptember 9, 2026
Syntetica Wants to Recycle Nylon. The Feedstock Barely Exists in Recoverable Form.
Chemical depolymerisation of nylon 6 back to caprolactam is proven chemistry with decades of industrial history. The constraint has always been that most nylon in the world is blended into textiles that cannot be separated.
ExplainerSeptember 9, 2026
Carbonating Demolition Waste: How Old Concrete Absorbs CO2 Back
Crushed concrete reacts with CO2 to form calcium carbonate. Done deliberately, that upgrades recycled aggregate and stores a modest amount of carbon — and the modest part is where most reporting goes wrong.
Myth-BustingSeptember 8, 2026
"Infinitely recyclable" is a property of glass, not a description of what happens to it
Glass really can be melted and remade forever without losing quality. About a third of it in the US actually is. The gap between those two sentences is the entire story.
TeardownSeptember 8, 2026
"Plasma and lemon juice" recycles batteries — the headline is doing a lot of work
Rice University reports ~95% recovery of critical metals using citric acid. The chemistry is genuinely clever. The framing around it — the lemon, the 10% figure, the record — does not survive a close read.
Myth-BustingSeptember 7, 2026
"30% Recycled Content" Under Mass Balance Might Mean None in Your Bottle
Mass balance accounting lets a producer allocate recycled input to selected outputs. The molecules are real somewhere in the plant. They are not necessarily in the product carrying the label.
ExplainerSeptember 6, 2026
Acrylic Is the One Plastic That Really Does Unzip
PMMA depolymerises back to its own monomer at high yield with nothing more exotic than heat. It is the clearest existing example of true chemical recycling — and the reason it stays rare is collection, not chemistry.
TeardownSeptember 6, 2026
tozero's Acid-Free Battery Recycling: Strong Chemistry, Small Numbers
A pilot plant recovering lithium without mineral acid is a genuine contribution. The gap between pilot tonnage and the volume of batteries reaching end of life this decade is three orders of magnitude.
ExplainerSeptember 6, 2026
Microwaves and Deep Eutectic Solvents: A Gentler Route to Battery Lithium
Conventional battery recycling dissolves cathodes in hot mineral acid. Microwave-assisted leaching in a deep eutectic solvent does the same job at lower temperature, in minutes, with a solvent you can in principle reuse.
ExplainerSeptember 1, 2026
The recycling black sheep: sorting the film that optical sorters cannot see
Flexible film and black plastic defeat the two technologies a modern sorting plant relies on. A Finnish process uses density and water instead — and a 50,000-tonne plant is being built around it.
ExplainerAugust 31, 2026
Dirty PET goes in. An underwater glue and a stronger plastic come out.
Conventional PET recycling wants clean, clear, single-stream bottles. Oak Ridge built a catalyst-free route that takes the contaminated stuff and splits it into two high-value materials instead of low-grade flake.
ExplainerAugust 28, 2026
Scrap car aluminium has an iron problem. Oak Ridge designed an alloy that eats it.
Shredders mix steel rivets into aluminium body sheet, and iron makes recycled aluminium brittle. ORNL's answer was not to purify the scrap but to design an alloy that tolerates the contamination — found by screening two million calculations and verified with neutrons.
Myth-BustingAugust 27, 2026
"When in doubt, put it in the recycling — they'll sort it out"
The EPA's guidance is the exact opposite sentence. One in four items in the bin is contamination, it costs the system $300 million a year, and the doubtful item does not get rescued by the machine.
TeardownAugust 26, 2026
Two "direct recycling" startups just got $150M from DOE
Nth Cycle took $100M and Princeton NuEnergy $50M out of the DOE's $500M battery round. Both have operating plants and third-party numbers — which is more than most. Neither has solved the part a grant cannot buy: feedstock.
ExplainerAugust 25, 2026
The plastic that evaporates at 90 °C — and rebuilds itself
A Surrey team made a polyethylene-like polymer that turns to vapour at around 90 °C and condenses back into the same solid. The mechanism is elegant. The distance between it and a recycling system is the whole story.
TeardownAugust 24, 2026
"They charged for recycling, then dumped it with the trash"
Two doorbell videos show recycling carts going into a garbage truck. That is real evidence of a service failure — and not evidence that recycling is fake. The gap between those two statements is where the actual records live.
Myth-BustingAugust 23, 2026
Donated clothes are not guaranteed to be worn again
A donation bin is a sorting decision, not a disposal guarantee. Wearable, repairable, rag-grade and unusable all go different places — and the condition of what you put in decides which.
ExplainerAugust 23, 2026
Can mixed plastic waste become the building blocks for new plastics?
Covestro is backing BioBTX to build a commercial plant in Delfzijl that turns hard-to-recycle plastic into benzene, toluene and xylene. The chemistry is straightforward. The evidence is a construction schedule.
TeardownAugust 21, 2026
Denovia's "millions to billions" polyester framework
A molecular-recycling company and a major polyester producer have agreed to work together. The announcement contains a number measured in billions of pounds. It also contains no obligation to build a plant, process a tonne, or license anything.
ExplainerAugust 21, 2026
How biohazardous lab plastics can become recyclable material
Laboratory plastic is regulated waste before it is a material. A new on-site system shreds, disinfects and dewaters it where it is generated, so what leaves the building is polymer flake rather than a hazard consignment. The step from flake to product is the one still missing.
TeardownAugust 20, 2026
EPS transport packaging leaves the “problematic” list — but is it circular?
On 19 August the U.S. Plastics Pact removed expanded-polystyrene transport packaging from its Problematic and Unnecessary Materials list, citing a recycling rate above 30%. That is a real result on a narrow slice of foam — and it is not permission to put your foam cup in the recycling bin.
ExplainerAugust 20, 2026
Can aircraft waste become an aerogel?
Carbon-fibre epoxy composites are among the hardest materials to recycle, because the resin will not melt back. A team at NUS skips fibre recovery entirely and turns the whole waste stream — fibre and epoxy together — into a freeze-dried porous block.
Myth-BustingAugust 19, 2026
"If it is plastic, put it in the recycling bin"
Bags, wraps and mailers are plastic, carry resin codes, and look recyclable. They are also one of the most reliable ways to shut down a sorting line.
TeardownAugust 19, 2026
Does BASF's tyre-derived wall paint close the loop?
End-of-life tyres go into a pyrolysis reactor; a certified share of recycled feedstock comes out attributed to a tin of interior paint. The chemistry is real, the audit is real, and the word doing the most work is "attributed".
Myth-BustingAugust 18, 2026
"Recycling is always better than reuse"
Recycling has become the default green answer, which quietly skips two better options sitting above it. The waste hierarchy is not a slogan — it is a ranking, and it puts reuse first for a specific reason.
ExplainerAugust 18, 2026
Can LFP batteries be recycled without dissolving them?
Iron-and-phosphate cathodes are cheap, which is exactly why conventional recycling struggles to pay for them. Direct regeneration takes a different route: repair the cathode powder instead of breaking it back down into salts.
Myth-BustingAugust 17, 2026
Paper cannot be recycled forever
Paper is one of recycling's genuine success stories — 68.2% recovery, the largest modelled share of MSW greenhouse-gas reduction. It is also finite at the fibre level. The loop is a cascade, not a circle.
ExplainerAugust 17, 2026
Can wastewater be a mine? The coagulant loop, explained
A UK startup just raised £700,000 to pull aluminium and iron treatment chemicals back out of water-plant sludge. It is a good excuse to explain a circular loop most people never see: the chemicals that clean water can themselves be recovered.
Myth-BustingAugust 16, 2026
All glass is not interchangeable in the recycling bin
A tumbler and a jam jar look like the same material. To a container-glass furnace they are not. Here is why household glass collection is built around bottles and jars specifically — and what to do with everything else.
TeardownAugust 16, 2026
MIT's recyclable stretch yarn: a design win, not yet a system
A polyethylene core-sheath yarn that stretches like PET-spandex and survives ten melt-and-respin cycles. The material result is real. The gap between a recyclable yarn and a recyclable garment is where almost all of the difficulty still sits.
ExplainerAugust 15, 2026
The battery-fire tripwire inside an MRF
CP Group's Sentry pairs X-ray with RGB cameras and AI to spot batteries and propane cylinders on a moving recycling line. Circular Services is installing it now — here is how the detection zone works, and which numbers nobody has published yet.
Myth-BustingAugust 14, 2026
Recycling does not always use more energy than making something new
Collection trucks and sorting lines are visibly energy-hungry, which makes the myth feel obvious. EPA's own numbers say otherwise for most materials — but the word doing the damage in the myth is "always", and it cuts both ways.
TeardownAugust 14, 2026
75% recycled does not equal 75% circular
SABIC has launched a carbon-fibre-reinforced polycarbonate with more than 75% post-consumer recycled content, made from water bottles, CDs, golf shafts and turbine blades. The materials engineering is real. The circularity claim is doing more work than the data supports.
Myth-BustingAugust 13, 2026
A greasy pizza box does not automatically belong in the trash
Grease alone is not a disqualifier for a pizza box — EPA says recycle it. Loose food, liners and your local programme's rules are the parts that actually decide.
TeardownAugust 13, 2026
Divert's 2.5-million-pound food-to-energy claim: circular loop or scoped case study?
Divert and US Cold Storage say 2.5 million pounds of unsold food became renewable natural gas and fertiliser in 15 months. The operating facts are solid. The carbon accounting behind them is not published.
Myth-BustingAugust 12, 2026
No, plastic cannot be recycled forever
Metals and glass survive remelting largely intact. Polymers do not. Every mechanical loop shortens chains, and the recycling symbol says nothing about how many loops a package will realistically get.
TeardownAugust 12, 2026
ERI Vietnam: a good partner, an unproven loop
A 50/50 e-waste venture between a large US recycler and a Vietnamese environmental-services group has real operational strengths. What it does not yet have is a plant, a permit, a mass balance or a named downstream buyer.
Myth-BustingAugust 11, 2026
No, the recycling facility does not wash your containers
A sorting facility separates materials. It does not run a dishwasher. Here is what "empty and rinsed" actually means, why food-soiled items cause real damage, and where over-cleaning becomes its own problem.
TeardownAugust 11, 2026
Mexico's paper recycling headline, taken apart
54.1% recovered. 89.5% recycled content. Both figures are real, both come from the same 10 August study, and they measure different things. Separating them changes what the numbers say about household recycling.
ExplainerAugust 10, 2026
How an AI-assisted MRF actually sorts your recycling
Abu Dhabi is building a 400,000 tonne-a-year material recovery facility with optical sorting and AI. Here is what that machinery actually does to a conveyor belt of mixed waste - and what still falls off the end as residue.
TeardownAugust 10, 2026
Nine companies, one shared recycling line: Japan's flexible-packaging trial
A Ministry of the Environment-commissioned demonstration puts nine Japanese companies on a shared platform to delaminate and deink flexible packaging. It is a genuinely interesting infrastructure model. It is not yet proof of scale.
Myth-BustingAugust 10, 2026
No, burning trash for electricity does not make recycling pointless
Energy recovery has a legitimate place in a waste system. It sits below prevention, reuse, recycling and composting - and roughly a tenth of what goes in still comes out as ash bound for landfill.
Myth-BustingAugust 7, 2026
A dead lithium-ion battery is not safe in the trash or the blue bin
A battery that no longer powers your device still holds enough energy to start a fire when it is crushed in a collection truck or a sorting line. The recycling symbol on it does not mean curbside.
TeardownAugust 7, 2026
PureCycle's commercial rebound has real proof points - the economics are still on trial
Q2 brought first branded resin deliveries, seven customer conversions and 173% revenue growth. It also brought a $142m net loss. A look at what advanced recycling has actually demonstrated, and what remains a forecast.
ExplainerAugust 7, 2026
Dirty solvent in, reusable solvent out: the distillation loop behind on-site recycling
A US$25m financing deal for on-site solvent recycling is a good excuse to look at the mechanism itself: how heat, vapour and a condenser separate reusable solvent from everything else - and what the leftover still bottoms actually cost you.
TeardownAugust 5, 2026
Casablanca's $1.5B waste-to-energy bet: circular solution or combustion lock-in?
A 33.5-year exclusive treatment concession, three combustion lines and roughly 1 TWh a year. The contracts are signed. The financing, the emissions baseline and the recycling question are not.
Myth-BustingAugust 5, 2026
"Compostable" does not mean backyard-compostable
A compostable label describes how a product behaves under specified industrial conditions. It is not a promise that your compost heap, or your recycling bin, can handle it.
Myth-BustingAugust 1, 2026
Is Turning Plastic Into Hydrogen Actually Recycling?
The chemistry is real. The label is doing a lot of work. If the outputs are hydrogen gas and mineral carbonate, no plastic has been recycled — something else has happened.
ExplainerAugust 1, 2026
How Alkaline Thermal Treatment Pulls Hydrogen Out of Unsorted Plastic
A new PNAS study converts mixed PET, PE and PP into >90% pure hydrogen in one reactor — no polymer sorting, and most of the carbon never reaches the gas phase.
Myth-BustingJuly 31, 2026
Recycling Everything Is Not Automatically More Circular Than Reuse
China's second-life battery decision is being read as a win for the circular economy. Shredding a working battery to recover its metals is the opposite of the waste hierarchy.