Today's Article (28/1/2026)
Europe’s supermarket shelves packed with ‘misleading’ claims about recycled plastic packaging
[...] plastic manufacturing arm of the oil company Saudi Aramco. The Saudi state-owned holding opposes production cuts under the UN plastic treaty and is the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter (more than 70m tonnes up to 2023).
To promote so-called sustainable plastic, the petrochemical industry is pushing pyrolysis, the most common type of chemical recycling. This highly energy- and carbon-intensive process converts plastic waste into recycled feedstock: pyrolysis oil. This hazardous compound, however, can make up at most 5% of total feedstock and must be diluted with 95% virgin naphtha, a petroleum derivative, to avoid damaging the steam-cracking plants that turn the input into new plastic.
To present appealing figures of high recycling rates and low emissions for brands eager to attract customers, the industry relies on two controversial but lawful accounting tricks.
“Mass-balance bookkeeping” attributes the recycled input to specific output batches. For example, if 5% pyrolysis oil (mixed with 95% naphtha) is credited to 5% of 100 tonnes, those 5 tonnes can be certified as “100% recycled” packaging, even if they contain only fossil feedstock and no actual recycled material.
Also controversial is the “avoided emissions” approach. Subtracting the carbon that would have been released if a volume of waste equivalent to that recycled had been incinerated creates apparent savings compared with virgin plastic production.
Public records suggest that the recycled material or pyrolysis oil used by Sabic (2,600 tonnes in 2022) to produce plastic may represent even less than 5% of the total feedstock, given the huge quantity of naphtha (4m tonnes) fed into the company’s European cracking plants in the Netherlands.
The carbon footprint calculation, or life cycle assessment (LCA), by the petrochemical group admits that the full process from pyrolysis to cracking emits 6% to 8% more than producing plastic from fossil fuel. Only by counting avoided incineration do the net benefits appear positive: about 2kg of CO₂ less per kilogram of recycled plastic.
“What matters is not hypothetical emissions from incineration that are ‘avoided’ on paper, but what is actually emitted in reality,” Maurer said.