The IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, Svensk Plaståtervinning (Swedish Plastic Recycling), and LCA researcher Tomas Ekvall recently released a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) report, which indicates that "downcycling" - such as recycling waste without sorting - has "almost as much" climate impact as incinerating these plastic wastes.

Three approaches for managing plastic packaging waste were compared: one involves directly incinerating the waste for energy recovery without sorting or remanufacturing; another is downcycling, where mixed plastic waste is not sorted or remanufactured and is instead used to produce railway sleepers; and the last approach is advanced sorting with high-quality recycling, where plastics are sorted and individually remanufactured after classification. The real data from the Institute's zero waste facility (Site Zero) in Sweden was utilized.

The results show that, compared to incinerating unsorted waste, downgraded recycling can only reduce climate impact by an additional 4%, while advanced sorting and high-quality recycling can reduce climate impact by 27%.

"The research results show that high-quality recycling through advanced sorting is more beneficial to the environment than downgraded recycling," said Rickard Jansson, a R&D engineer for plastic recycling in Sweden and a member of the project's expert panel.