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“A mistake by design” — that’s how Beltrán Orrego sees any plastic waste, particularly if that plastic waste has escaped into the environment. This instinctive reaction to litter is most visceral when it’s in nature, where seeing discarded man-made objects, whether it’s a water bottle or abandoned car, reflects a jarring human encroachment on the natural world.

Orrego works with Chilean injection molder and recycler Comberplast, which launched its Atando Cabos project to pull waste plastic from the environment and repurpose it into new items. Its primary source of such waste is the salmon-farming detritus in the Patagonia. On vacation in the region years ago, it was one of Comberplast’s founders whose encounters with abandoned ropes and nets amongst the grandeur of the fjords and channels became an impetus to do something. In this issue, you can read about Comberplast’s latest project partnering with one of the world’s largest producers of lithium to create reusable plastic pallets from that recovered fishing waste, as well as the lithium firm’s in-house plastic scrap.

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The plastics industry perceives the promise and potential of plastic scrap. Source: Getty

For people like Orrego, that work in the plastics industry seeing everyday items fabricated from the highly engineered materials we know discarded as trash does indeed seem like a “mistake.” Early in my career, I sat in on a presentation discussing the various breakthroughs achieved in the package design for a “sports drink” bottle. The bottle in question featured a series of raised panels. Each distinct panel and its various facets, which I had thought to simply be decorative flourishes, were in fact the patented outcome of hours of engineering work that enabled the plastic container to withstand the hot-filling process and replace glass, resulting in a package that would dramatically cut the beverage’s weight and the CO₂ emissions required to ship it. To this day, when I see a sports drink bottle or any plastic product, I consider the purposeful engineering that went into its design, thinking about the specific material grades and additives it’s made from and the specialized machines and molds that created it.

In addition to Comberplast, in this issue you can read about Mexican film extruder Bioflex applying new technology to process postindustrial and postconsumer plastic waste into new films; Nova Chemicals writing about the opportunities to be exploited in mechanical recycling of plastics, including its own new facility for reclaiming postconsumer polyethylene; and the challenges of sourcing reclaimed polypropylene, particularly as some studies point to the contamination of food-contact-intended streams with recycled electronic waste.

This confluence of content is no accident. At this moment in the industry, an overwhelming interest to redirect plastics products in their end of life out of the environment is met by innovative players and technologies specifically targeting that very plastic “waste” as an untapped resource. The old adage holds that one man’s trash is another’s treasure, and that might be true, but I think we can all agree that treating treasure as “trash” is surely a mistake.