Led by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the task force brought together leaders from some of the largest chemical using, product-making, and waste management companies to share information and work out a way forward for the global polymers in liquid formulations (PLFs) industry.
According to the RSC, the group believes it will be possible to develop and scale the first biodegradable PLFs and advance circular economy infrastructure for these chemicals in a seven-year timeframe. These two goals are said to underpin a wider ambition for the $125bn sector to become sustainable by 2040.
The way that PLFs are made, used, and disposed releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, uses up finite resources, and generates waste. Details of how the chemical industry can make these ingredients more sustainable is revealed in the RSC’s new report, The PLFs Revolution: Our 2040 roadmap for sustainable polymers in liquid formulations.
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PLFs have numerous day-to-day uses but, despite their ubiquity and usefulness, most are not recyclable and are made using fossil-based petrochemical sources. Every year, over 36 million tonnes of these ingredients are made and not recovered.
In a statement, Professor Anju Massey-Brooker, industry associate at the Royal Society of Chemistry, said: “We are being deliberately ambitious. The scale of this challenge is immense; PLFs can be found in everything from cosmetics and make-up to fertilisers and lubricants for machinery. However, with the right funding and collaboration, we can design biodegradable PLFs and put in place the infrastructure needed to create circular economies for them, so that products retain their usefulness while being more sustainable.
“Government, academics, industry, and the public have shown this can be done through their work to reduce the harms caused by plastic pollution; all these groups now need to come together and join the PLFs revolution.”
The PLFs Task Force was established in 2021 to advance research and innovation that would bring about a manageable transition to sustainable PLFs. This has culminated in the release of the roadmap which calls on industry, academia, and policymakers to help facilitate the transition.
Tony Heslop, Senior Sustainability Manager at BASF, said: “As the global population grows, demand for PLFs will only increase – and our industry needs to take the transition to a sustainable PLFs ecosystem seriously. This means moving away from fossil to biobased feedstocks and creating a circular economy to minimise waste and maximise reuse and recycling.
“This is of course something that no industry body or organisation can tackle in isolation, and as such, the RSC’s task force provides a strategic platform that allows us to work with our industry peers to generate solutions that we can all benefit from, while reducing our collective impact on the planet.”
The UK government is called upon to create a national chemicals regulator that would set a gold standard in regulation, while academic institutions are asked to use PLFs terminology, collaborate with industry and publish research to stimulate innovation in this field. The roadmap calls also for industry to rapidly advance research and development on PLFs.
Task force members include Afton Chemicals; BASF; Croda, Crown Paints; Dow; Northumbrian Water; Scott Bader; Unilever; United Utilities; Walgreens Boots Alliance.
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