Plastic bags, bottles and straws clogging landfills and choking oceans started life as barrels of crude.

Technology is available to turn such garbage back into fuel, an idea that would seem to be a no-brainer — allowing the EU to tackle plastic pollution and climate change at the same time.

Not so fast.

“All this plastic would be incinerated, and I doubt this would be better for the environment,” said Bart Martens, an assistant to Kathleen Van Brempt, a Belgian Socialist MEP pushing for plastic-derived fuels to count toward national binding targets for the share of renewable energy to be used in the transport sector.

Proponents argue this technology has the potential to decarbonize transport, especially in aviation, where no renewable alternatives exist thanks to tough safety requirements, and that it is a better option than landfilling or incineration. It’s why supporters pushed for its inclusion in the recast Renewable Energy Directive, which negotiators from Parliament, Council and the Commission are hashing out on Thursday in trilateral talks.

But critics fiercely oppose plastic-to-fuel technology. Green groups argue there is a contradiction between the Commission’s waste regulation — aiming to cut the use of throwaway plastic and setting high recycling targets — and the inclusion of plastic-derived fuels under the bloc’s renewable energy rules.

“If we get better at recycling, the plastic waste should also go down. Why invest in super expensive infrastructure just to deal with a temporary problem?” asked Janek Vahk, a policy officer at the NGO Zero Waste Europe. “You are locking in member states in the situation where they would have to continue plastic waste.”

Troubled trilogues

All three institutions support the technology’s inclusion under the bloc’s future renewable energy rules, but to different degrees.

Parliament favors plastic-derived fuels, as long as they don’t undermine recycling efforts. “It’s the missing link between material recycling and energy recovering. Either you decide to give it a place on the market, or not,” Martens said.

The support comes with the caveat that the fuel could only be made from waste that is “not reusable and not mechanically recyclable … with full respect of the waste hierarchy,” which gives priority to reusing and recycling.

The Council is even more enthusiastic. According to the latest draft text of the directive, obtained by POLITICO, the Council will push for the inclusion of fuels from all solid waste.

Plastic-derived fuels found their place in the Council’s position after four countries, the U.K., the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Finland pushed for their inclusion, according to their comments on the Bulgarian Council presidency’s proposal, also obtained by POLITICO. No other country raised concerns.

But Parliament says it worries that an uncritical embrace of plastics-to-fuel would wreak havoc on the current emphasis to recycle and reuse materials as many times as possible.

“If you drop the safeguards that we included in the Parliament’s position, you turn the waste hierarchy on its head,” Martens said.

The Commission is more cautious: It recognizes the role of such fuels, but it is keen to emphasize that “only fuels that can contribute effectively towards decarbonization of our economy should be supported,” a Commission spokesperson said.

Their inclusion under the bloc’s future renewable energy rules, therefore, seems inevitable.

But this enthusiasm for filling fuel tanks with ex-plastic is at odds with the Commission’s big plans for the circular economy and increased recycling.

The Commission’s Plastics Strategy does acknowledge something called “chemical recycling,” a process that breaks plastic into monomers, its basic building blocks, which “could more than double the present recycling rate.”

But the Commission is adamant that chemical recycling should be used only to turn old plastics back into new materials. Recycling “does not include … the reprocessing into materials that are to be used as fuels,” the Waste Framework Directive says.

Asked whether plastic-derived fuels should count as recycling, a Commission spokesperson wrote in an email that “waste recovery processes which reprocess carbon-based plastics into chemicals can be considered as chemical recycling. However, the recycling definition of this directive excludes from the scope of recycling the reprocessing into materials that are to be used as fuels.

“Therefore, waste-derived fuels, irrespective of the treatment used, cannot be counted towards the recycling targets.”

Going it alone

Untroubled by the Commission’s warning, some countries are moving ahead with plastics-to-fuel plans.

The U.K. has several plants designed for the conversion. And Canadian company Enerkem is planning to build a plant able to convert 360,000 tons of waste into 270 million liters of “green” methanol while saving 300,000 tons of CO2 in the port of Rotterdam. This month it wrote to EU negotiators urging them to allow the use of solid waste for the production of “low-carbon fuel.”

In Cyprus, Zeme Eco Fuels and Alloys is planning to transform plastics into fuel by breaking down the polymers chemically. Its plant will start operations in 2019.

“We are producing green fuel, increasing energy independence, and at the same time it counts toward recycling, because you’re turning this into something that is extremely useful and viable,” Zeme CEO Antonis Antoniadis said.

Antoniadis says the technology not only helps clean up transport through lower CO2 and sulfur emissions, but it can also help boost recycling rates.

Cyprus risks €30,000 a day in fines for failing to tackle its illegal landfills. It had a recycling rate of only 17 percent in 2016, but it could hit the EU’s long-term target of recycling 65 percent of municipal waste by 2035 in only two or three years if it starts to turn plastics into fuel, Antoniadis said.

However, that would seem to violate the Commission’s rules on what counts as recycled waste. If plastic is used for fuel, once it releases its energy content it can no longer be recycled, green groups protest, and that may lead to “unjustifiably higher recycling rates,” wrote Zero Waste Europe.

But Antoniadis is eager to reassure critics that his plant would use only plastics contaminated with food or hazardous chemicals that can’t be safely turned into new products.

“Ours is a complimentary solution as opposed to being an antagonistic one,” he said.

This article is part of a series on the circular economy, Getting Wasted.