McKinsey identifies engineering polymers as a recycling opportunity

The global consulting firm says collecting and reprocessing more discarded plastic automotive components should be feasible.

auto vehicle interior
The company says two of the biggest opportunities to access more postconsumer scrap for a sample polymer it studied are in the consumer goods and automotive products sectors in Europe and China.
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A report co-authored by four McKinsey & Co. staff members points to the hundreds of plastic types as a barrier to recycling and recommends focusing on engineering plastics used widely in automotive applications as one type that could be a worthy target for more recycling.

The report is co-authored by Christof Witte, Georg Winkler and Sebastian Göke from McKinsey’s Berlin office and Vladislav Vasilenko in its Frankfurt, Germany, office and is part of a six-part McKinsey series on “Materials Circularity.”

“There are hundreds of plastic types, each differing in chemical composition, properties and applications,” the report says. “Many of these plastics may have a distinct value chain, making it difficult to generalize plastics decarbonization and circularity.”

In terms of reducing emissions in the recycling process, the consultants say that the shorter the circular loop, the better the carbon footprint of the system.

To illustrate an example of a shorter circular loop, McKinsey points to the potential to collect and reprocess a greater volume of a specific engineering polymer it does not identify.

High-volume engineering or impact plastics include acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), high-impact polystyrene (HIPS), thermoplastic polyolefins (TPO), nylon 6, polyamides (PA) and polycarbonate (PC).

For the unidentified polymer chosen by McKinsey, it says 70 percent of its postconsumer scrap is not collected and 70 percent of what is collected is not fully recovered or recycled.

“These unrecovered and unrecycled volumes come from various industries, including consumer goods, construction, automotive, packaging and medical,” the report says.

McKinsey says the low recycling rate in the construction sector can be assigned to high commingling or contamination rates at demolition and other jobsites.

The company says two of the biggest opportunities to access more postconsumer scrap for the sample polymer are in the consumer goods and automotive products sectors in Europe and China.

The authors express optimism that recycling solutions are progressing fast in some portions of the plastics and polymers recycling sectors.

“Understanding opportunities to access unconquered pockets of secondary materials will be critical for setting up circular chains at sufficient scale,” the report says.