National PVC Waste Audit

National PVC Waste Audit - Vinyl Council Australia

The Vinyl Council, on behalf of the Signatories of the PVC industry’s Product Stewardship Program, commissioned a National PVC Waste Audit. The Audit was conducted by Nolan ITU in 2005 to understand and gather data on the amount of PVC waste entering the waste stream in Australia annually.

The major proportion of PVC resin is consumed in long life applications which take years to enter the waste stream. Based on historical resin consumption by application going back to the 1940s and average service life times for each application, the Audit estimated how much of each application would be entering the waste stream today and going forward to 2015.

The Audit is the most comprehensive study to date on the quantities of PVC waste currently generated in Australia. Data was obtained from importers and exporters, manufacturers, converters and recyclers.

Taking into consideration past and current market consumption and the lifespan of a typical product, Nolan-ITU estimated the current and future end-of-life PVC volumes by application and their expected destinations — recycling, left in-situ or landfill.

The audit suggested priorities for PVC recovery based on the amount of available end-of-life PVC by application, ease of recovery, current infrastructure, and technical issues in the recycling process.

The findings from data collected for the calendar year 2004 were:

• 158,300 tonnes of end-of-life PVC product was available for recovery

• Less than one per cent of the 16-20 million tonnes of waste sent to landfill each year in Australia was PVC

• 3.4 per cent of the total quantity of PVC products still in use were products at the end-of-life

• 10,035 tonnes of PVC recyclate was made from the PVC waste collected in existing recycling programs.

In order to decide recovery priorities, Nolan ITU considered a number of criteria.

1. The quantity of available PVC

2. The proportion of additives in the product

3. The likelihood of contamination complicating the recovery process

4. Current collection and reprocessing infrastructure

5. Market outlets for reprocessed materials.

The geographic distribution of the end-of-life products also determines if recycling is practical. For example, does the product exist in all households in the country or only in specific industry sectors. Size of the products is another factor. The larger a product, the fewer products required to reach a critical mass for recycling.

The priority areas for increased PVC recovery cover the building and construction, electrical and packaging industries.

These priorities do not necessarily reflect the expected amount of PVC available annually. For example, it was identified that while cable has a lower volume of end-of-life material available compared to other PVC products, the existing infrastructure associated with the copper wire recovery means there is a greater likelihood of recovering the PVC cable insulation.

The Product Stewardship Program has launched an Action Plan, Vinyl-2-Life to investigate barriers to recycling in the priority applications, set objectives and strategies and assist in the development of infrastructure for material recovery.