Is chemical recycling the solution to plastic waste?

The problem of plastic waste is not going anywhere. In fact, globally, we continue to generate more of it.

In the EU, plastic packaging waste alone makes up about 16 million tons a year — and only less than half of that is recycled. But across Europe, new recycling plants have been popping up, promising to recycle hundreds of thousands of tons of the particularly-hard-to-recycle material using a technology called chemical — or “advanced” — recycling.

From our partners at Deutsche Welle, DW, investigative environmental journalists Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor look into the idea.

Click on the player to hear the full story.