Plastics companies know about chemical recycling’s shortcomings — but still sell it as a solution

For years, the plastics industry’s narrative about recycling has been falling apart. Research and media investigations have revealed that it doesn’t make economic sense and that petrochemical companies have used it more as a public relations gambit than as a serious effort to mitigate the plastic pollution crisis. Conventional recycling has processed only 9 percent of plastic waste globally, leaving the rest to be landfilled, incinerated, or littered.

Rather than reducing the production of plastic...