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.
Topic
Recycling
Sorting lines, bales and material recovery: how recyclable material actually moves.
25 posts
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.