"Mass Balance" - Yet Another Greenwashy Attempt To Make "Advanced Recycling" Of Plastic Appear Real
Imagine you’re filling up 100 bags of coffee. You’re using beans from a few different providers — 10 percent of the beans they sent you are decaffeinated and the rest are caffeinated. However, you mixed them all together, so each bag is an even blend of 10 percent decaf, 90 percent caffeinated coffee beans. It’s a shame, though, because in this hypothetical, decaffeinated coffee is in high demand. People will pay a premium for bags of 100 percent decaf coffee. So instead of labeling each bag as a 10/90 blend of decaf/caffeinated coffee, you decide to label 90 bags as regular, fully caffeinated coffee beans, and the remaining 10 as “100 percent decaf.” You can now charge much more for those “decaf” bags.
It’s a misleading strategy, at best, and one that could cause rioting among coffee drinkers. But it’s not just a thought experiment. Plastic companies are using an even more convoluted version of this accounting technique in order to make it seem that their products have more recycled content than they really do. Mondelez, the owner of snack food brands like Chips Ahoy, Clif, Oreo, and Ritz, announced last September it would use this system, known as “mass balance,” for its North American Triscuit packaging. According to a press release, up to 50 percent of the plastic in the cracker boxes’ inner bags would be “sourced from advanced recycling technology” and provided by two of the companies in Mondelez’s supply chain, the plastics maker Berry and the chemical company LyondellBasell.
Mondelez hasn’t labeled its Triscuit packaging with these recycled content claims. But the company said the plan would contribute to its overall goal of achieving 5 percent recycled plastic content by the end of 2025, and that it would ease consumer guilt. “Triscuit fans can snack easier knowing that the brand is playing a role in helping reduce plastic waste,” Mondelez said. Independent and government watchdogs, however, aren’t as keen on mass balance. Last year, two dozen environmental organizations sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission arguing that it was “not based on scientific facts or operational engineering evidence.” They drew an analogy similar to the decaf coffee one outlined above. The California attorney general’s office recently called mass balance a “false and misleading marketing scheme,” and the accounting system was rejected last August by the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, which had considered whether to allow it to be used in products labeled with its “Safer Choice” logo. Now, mass balance has made Mondelez the target of a shareholder resolution demanding that the company substantiate its recycled content claims.
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The first problem is that there aren’t very many pyrolysis facilities in operation, so there isn’t much pyrolysis oil available. Furthermore — and this is the more central problem for recycled content claims — it isn’t possible to convert pure pyrolysis oil directly into new plastic. It first has to be separated into a derivative called naphtha, which, due to contamination from additives in the used plastic it was made from, has to be diluted with cleaner naphtha from virgin fossil fuels. Only then can the naphtha mixture go through a “steam cracker” to extract the chemical bases needed for new plastic pellets. This process is so complicated and expensive, said Andrew Rollinson, a chemical engineering consultant, that most pyrolysis oil is turned into fuels that can be burned for energy. “Often it’s burned because it’s no good for anything else,” he said. The need to dilute pyrolysis-derived naphtha means that any products claiming to contain “chemically recycled” plastic necessarily have a lot of virgin plastic in them too. The ratio is at most 10 percent recycled to 90 percent virgin content, according to one investigation from ProPublica. Rollinson said the actual number for plastic consumer goods may be less than 1 percent.
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https://grist.org/accountability/recycled-packaging-triscuit-mondelez-mass-balance-chemical-recycling/
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