This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: From the clear covering on your microwave meal to the flimsy bread bag lying on the kitchen counter, plastic film is notoriously tricky to recycle. But what if those annoying bits of plastic waste could be put to better use?
This hard-to-recycle plastic could potentially be transformed into a source of fuel, but the U.K.'s current recycling rules make it difficult for companies to innovate and experiment. The main legal barrier is the definition of recycling itself. Under the rules U.K. waste law is built on, recycling cannot include turning waste into anything that will be used as fuel.
A separate category for the plastics that are the hardest to recycle, recognizing fuel made from waste that would otherwise be burned, would give companies more scope to experiment with new ways to process it. As a legal researcher, I study how the law decides what counts as recycling. My work raises a simple question: If the rules allowed it, could dealing with one problem, plastic waste, also help ease another, our dependence on imported fuel?
In Darlington in northeast England, a chemical recycling company has received planning approval for what it describes as the U.K.'s first large-scale plant for recycling plastic film. The company, Endolys, plans to take up to 120,000 tonnes (132,000 tons) a year of waste plastic film, such as bread bags, wrappers and pouches, and turn it into so-called pyrolysis oil, subject to receiving an environmental permit from the Environment Agency. Pyrolysis involves heating plastic to a very high temperature without air.
With no oxygen, the plastic cannot burn, so it breaks down into pyrolysis oil along with some gas and solid residue. It is a little like making charcoal, where wood is heated without being allowed to catch fire. Recycling waste plastic film in this way has had mixed results around the world.
In the U.S. state of Texas, ExxonMobil now processes more than 70,000 tonnes (77,000 tons) of plastic waste a year this way. But in the Netherlands, a Rotterdam pyrolysis plant with a deal to supply Shell never reached its planned capacity and has now closed for good. In Japan, a plant using a related process with very hot, pressurized water opened in 2025 and can process 20,000 tonnes (22,000 tons) of waste plastic a year.
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